


no one shows; no one tells

by Edoro



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Abuse of Authority, Abusive Relationships, Bad Things Happening to Poor Cuthbert, Controlling/Possessive Behavior, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, M/M, Physical Abuse, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Violence, Trans Character, Trauma, Underage Rape/Non-con, Victim Blaming
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-24
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2020-01-25 17:16:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18578989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edoro/pseuds/Edoro
Summary: Cuthbert serves Gilead, and Cuthbert serves its dinh.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains and primarily consists _of_ the graphic sexual assault of a minor by an adult in a position of power over him. This is the first in a series of at least two and possibly several vignettes detailing a months-long campaign of abuse beginning shortly after Roland, Cuthbert, and Alain return from Mejis and ending with the fall of Gilead and Steven's death, which will be heavy on hurt and short on comfort. Consider this whump!fic, if you will. I wanted a break from writing long and plotty things and decided to delve into some unabashed and fairly directionless trauma.
> 
> You have been warned!
> 
> ETA: not rewrite au canon compliant.

Cuthbert stands before the dinh of Gilead and tries his best not to fidget. He is under no illusions that it will improve Steven Deschain’s opinion of him. The man thinks him a fool and a dandy in the making, fit neither to bear the guns nor to be friend and second to his son. All Cuthbert hopes to do is avoid worsening Steven’s already poor opinion.

(Privately, Cuthbert thinks Steven Deschain a cold, rigid, and not terribly clever man. As a boy, he’d wanted desperately for his best friend’s father to approve of him, but he is a gunslinger and a man, now, and has put such childish yearnings behind him.)

To be called before his dinh would be worrying under any circumstances. To be called into his dinh’s own private sitting room in his own suite of apartments in the middle of the night and to find the man there alone is baffling. And then to simply stand there, silent and waiting to be told why he was summoned, while Steven looks broodingly upon him -

“Sai Deschain,” Cuthbert says finally, when he cannot take one more second of that silent, piercing regard. “Might I ask for what purpose you have called me here tonight?” His active imagination swirls with ideas, each more outlandish than the last. Some secret mission, perhaps - something to do with Roland, still all caught up in the glammer of the awful pink ball they brought back from Mejis - some word of praise, for him alone, for his part in the most recent mission -

“You might ask,” Steven says, one corner of his mouth twitching slightly. It cannot be called a smile, but perhaps the restless ghost of one. His pale eyes bore into Cuthbert, sweeping up and down the length of his body. On Roland those eyes are intimidating; on his father they seem as if they can peer through one’s very flesh and bones.

Cuthbert folds his arms behind his back, clasping his hands together to keep from doing anything else with them. “I hope that at some point, you plan to tell me.” An impudent thing to say, no matter how even he tries to keep his tone. Cort would have slapped him for it. His own father might have pinched his arm the way he did when he wanted to tell Cuthbert to shut up without embarrassing either of them publicly. 

Steven Deschain simply keeps looking at him. That ghostly not-smile makes another appearance. “Tell me, boy,” he says, “are you virgin?”

It is such an appallingly inappropriate question, asked in such a normal tone, that Cuthbert finds himself answering honestly out of sheer shock. “I - yes, sir.” Face hot, he snaps his teeth shut on any further explanations or questions. 

“Really? I would not have thought so.”

Cuthbert flushes even more deeply at that, anger and shame twisting together in his gut. The words are a slap in the face, made worse by the easy, musing way they are delivered. He doesn’t know, either, whether he is more ashamed to admit that he hasn’t had sex yet or that Steven thought he had. Is it being taken as a failure of manhood on his part, that he hasn’t yet had a woman? Or does Steven see him, perhaps, the way others have, as some unnatural and licentious creature who put himself in the intimate company of his fellow ‘prentices in order to seduce them? That he cannot help but wonder, though he hopes most fervently not. It would be an especial blow coming from the man who, in his capacity as dinh of all Gilead, granted him the right to live as his father’s son.

Before he can say anything, Steven moves briskly on to his next question. “Have you bled?”

“Have I …?” Cuthbert does not understand. He’s seen his own blood more times than he can count, for the path of the gun is not an easy one.

Steven sighs, though he seems more amused than exasperated. “I speak of your woman’s parts. Surely your mother has had this conversation with you? It’s nigh on time, if she has not. Have you started your monthly bleeding yet?”

He had thought he could not be more humiliated. He realizes now that humiliation does not, perhaps, have a floor. Furious tears prick at his eyes. By sheer force of will alone, he keeps his voice still when he answers. “Yes, sir.” That had begun in Mejis, and though he had been broadly informed of what to expect, the actual reality of it had been mortifying enough it shames him to recall it still. “I cannot imagine why you would wish to know that, sir.”

Now Steven does smile, and it is a cold smile indeed. “I wish to know if you’re old enough. Come here.”

_ Old enough for what _ , Cuthbert does not ask. He does not want to ask. He does not want to approach this man, his dinh, his best friend’s father, who he has known his whole life, who suddenly has become a stranger. Nonetheless, he does, stepping forward haltingly until he stands just in front of the chair in which Steven is seated, almost touching his knees. Within grabbing distance, he can’t help but think.

Steven doesn’t grab at him. “Undress,” he says, waving a hand, which is worse.

For a long time, Cuthbert cannot make himself move. Distantly, he thinks of simply turning around and leaving. If he does, though, he might as well keep walking and leave Gilead behind entire, for it is the direst of crimes to disobey one’s dinh. Gilead - and Gilead’s dinh - he does not much care for just now, but he thinks of Roland, and of Alain, and of Jamie and Thomas, and of his father and mother, and he knows he cannot do that.

Slowly, he untucks his shirt from his pants. He’d been summoned from the barracks, on the verge of sleep, dressed only in his drawers and slinkum, and hastily thrown on trousers and a proper shirt. The shirt is not tucked well or evenly, and comes loose quickly. He draws it over his head, then stands there holding it in his hands, his mind so blank he has no idea what to do next.

Taking, perhaps, some strange sort of pity on him, Steven takes it from his hands. Thus freed, Cuthbert grasps the hem of the thin and sleeveless slinkum shirt which is, now, the only thing between his bare skin and the weight of Steven’s eyes. He swallows. His hands do not move. His fingers clutch at the shirt, nails digging into his palms through it.

“I don’t wish to repeat myself,” Steven says mildly.

Cuthbert takes off the shirt and drops it to the ground. It is summer, and warm inside the castle, but gooseflesh ripples over his body as soon as the shirt is gone, every hair on his chest and stomach standing up straight. He has seen his friends and classmates shirtless for bed and undressed to bathe or swim, and knows he has more hair than many of the boys his age, all fine and dark and downy. He started growing it a couple of years earlier, at the same time he started growing breasts. The hair he likes, for he can even grow a scattering of it on his chin; the breasts less so. Those his hands rise up to cover, all unbidden.

Steven snorts. “Oh, come now, what are you trying to hide there? A pair of bites from a mosquito? Christopher’s boy has more tits than you.”

Shoulders miserably hunched, Cuthbert lowers his hands. He cannot look directly at Steven now. That cold blue gaze feels like a hundred insects crawling over him. He puts his hands to his trousers, undoes the top two buttons, and then stops, unable to continue.

“Sai Deschain, sir,” he says, unable to keep his voice from trembling, “I - I ask your leave to go. I have lessons on the morrow.” Perhaps if he reminds Steven that he is a gunslinger - not a ‘prentice, either, but a novice who will at the turn of the year be granted the guns passed down his family line from father to son since the time of Arthur Eld - this will stop. Perhaps it will turn out to simply be a dream. Perhaps Steven is drunk and has mistaken him for a gilly.

“You do not have it. Take off your pants.” Steven sounds almost bored, but his eyes are sharp.

Cuthbert undoes the final button on his pants and pushes them down. He does not think he can bear to strip off another piecemeal piece of clothing, so he hooks his thumbs in the waistband of his drawers and shucks them off along with his pants.

In his dazed and disbelieving state, he did not account for his boots. He bends awkwardly to remove first one and then the other so that his pants can come off. Steven’s sitting room is lushly carpeted, so there is no cold stone beneath his bare feet, but he still feels very small and chilled.

Steven looks him up and down. He wants to curl in on himself, but forces himself to stand still and straight, hands at his sides. If he is to be shamed in this manner, he will bear it like a man. He will bear it like a gunslinger. He will not hide or pule or cry like a frightened child.

“You truly do have a mannish figure,” Steven says musingly. “A boon to you, I suppose. Save for the lack of a cock, I might think I was looking at a born man.”

Ridiculously, Cuthbert’s numb lips and tongue form the words, “Thank you.” It is not a compliment, and he is not grateful. He seems to have spoken on reflex, with no input from his brain. This is not uncommon for him. When he cannot think well is when his mouth runs off the most. 

Steven smiles. Cuthbert is terribly afraid the man is going to touch him, now.

Instead, he waves towards the doorway off to the left. “Go get in bed. I’ll be in presently.”

Even though he feels as if he is wading through a nightmare, Cuthbert cannot help gazing curiously around Steven’s bedchamber. He has more than a touch of natural nosiness, and the desire to view the man’s private space distracts, somewhat, from his panicked thoughts of what is going to come.

The bed is huge and well-appointed, piled with blankets. A massive wooden wardrobe stands against one wall, looming over the room. There is a writing desk littered with maps and books, an unbelievable wealth of paper even to Cuthbert, who grew up in Gilead. An assortment of fat pillar candles lend the room a flickering light, and guide his way to the bed.

He slides in beneath the covers and pulls them up to his chin. Soon enough, he is sure, he will be all uncovered, but right then he doesn’t wish to be. Being so covered does not make him feel any less exposed, though. The sheets are crisp and cool against his skin, such that he cannot forget his nakedness.

When Steven comes in, he is naked as well. Though Cuthbert doesn’t want to look at him, he can’t help but stare. He’s seen his fellow ‘prentices undressed for bathing or swimming or bed, seen the odd glimpse of a prick pulled out to take a piss, even a time or two gotten up early enough and spotted another fellow pitching a tent in his sheets in the morning, but he’s never seen a grown man nude before.

Steven’s body is narrow and skinny and corded with lean muscle, his skin criss-crossed by old pale scars. There is hair on his chest and his belly, descending in a coarse dark trail down to the wild curly bush of it between his legs, from which his cock sprouts. Though Cuthbert has fantasized - all a-flush and a-sweat and a-tingle with the sensual wickedness of such thoughts - of what it might be like to lay with another man, though he’s thought many a time of joining in the games his fellow gunslingers-in-training play amongst each other after lights-out, the normal boyish exploration, he finds that at this moment, it strikes him as an absurd thing. Long and skinny it is, with a flushed and bulbous head, and it waggles back and forth as Steven walks towards him. Distantly, watching the way that Steven’s cock and balls swing to and fro with his steps, Cuthbert wonders how any of the boys he knows get anything done with all that jiggling about going on down between their legs.

He shifts, almost unconsciously, towards the middle of the bed. Steven stops at the edge of it. They look at each other, Steven standing there quite unselfconsciously naked, Cuthbert sitting up and clutching the blankets to his bare chest as if that could do anything.

Steven climbs into bed on his knees and pulls the blankets away with ruthless ease. Once he has Cuthbert bared before him, he swings one leg over and comes to rest kneeling over Cuthbert’s legs, pinning him neatly in place. Cuthbert stares at his cock, jutting up between them and so very nearly touching him, then up at his face. There is some heat in his eyes, now, some hint of emotion on his face - his pupils are wide and dark and his cheeks faintly flushed. This, Cuthbert supposes, is what desire looks like. It’s as awful to look at the man’s face as it is to look at his cock, so Cuthbert fixes his gaze in the middle, on his chest, on the shadows visible between his ribs.

“I take your admission of virginity to mean you’ve not had a woman nor taken a cock inside yourself,” Steven says. “But I know well enough what sorts of games a bunch of vigorous young lads will get up to when you bunk them all together in one room and they start finding out what their peckers are for, so, tell me: have you ever used your hand or mouth to please one of your fellows? Or let him rut between your thighs? No, I suppose that might be a bit dangerous for you, eh?”

The skin of Cuthbert’s face is so hot and tight it is a wonder his cheeks haven’t started bleeding. He does not wish to imagine this man as a boy his own age, fooling about with his bunkmates. “No,” he says. “I have not. Curiously, I’ve never been invited.” It is another reminder of the awkward status he enjoys. He is a normal boy among them until, suddenly, he isn’t. He supposes he has that about himself to think for being here tonight as well.

Steven chuckles dryly. “I suppose not. Perhaps you intimidate them. Though you might have much to teach them that would be of use, and for less than they’d pay at any of the pleasure houses in the low town, either. A thought for you to keep in mind, perhaps, should you find yourself in want of some company.”

Cuthbert simply makes an assenting noise. An image comes to him, ridiculous and terrible, of being called back in a week’s time and asked to report on his experiment joining in the peek-and-tell, and whether or not his presentation went well - his mind conjures a further image of himself sitting atop Master Vannay’s desk with legs splayed, speaking to the class, while the old man takes down notes on how well he’s doing - 

“Give me your hand, now.” Steven does not wait to be given it, but reaches out and grabs it. Without thinking, Cuthbert flinches back. The grip on his wrist tightens to the point of pain. It is only relaxed when he relaxes, and lets himself be moved about as Steven wishes.

Steven takes his hand and puts it on his cock, carefully curling his fingers in around it and holding it in place there with his own. He starts to stroke himself, pulling Cuthbert’s hand along, and rocks his hips shallowly in rhythm. 

It feels sort of like touching a flexed muscle, though the skin covering it is very soft and shifts with the motion of his hand. It’s hot and he can feel the pulse against his fingers. Part of him is fascinated with it. Part of him wonders if this is how it would feel to touch Roland’s cock, or Alain’s. He tries to focus on those thoughts and not on the part of his mind which is preoccupied with the fact that the cock he’s touching right now belongs to his best friend’s father. Mercifully, Steven does not make him meet his eyes.

After a moment, Steven removes his own hand. Cuthbert falters, then resumes stroking. Steven starts to move his hips more, fucking into Cuthbert’s hand, and Cuthbert starts to wonder if perhaps he’s only been brought here to pull the man off. He could bear that, he thinks. Why that would necessitate the two of them naked together in Steven’s bed, that he can’t answer, but perhaps - perhaps Steven just wants to look at him, just wants to watch his own spend splatter across Cuthbert’s bare chest, perhaps that’s all -

“Stop,” Steven says. He reaches for Cuthbert’s wrist once more, but Cuthbert needs no encouragement to let go and let his hand drop back down to his side. The warmth of Steven’s cock seems to linger on the skin of his palm. He wishes for soap and hot water to scrub his fingers clean.

“Lie down,” Steven says. For a moment, Cuthbert simply stares at him, uncomprehending - is he not already in bed? - and then, when he sees Steven move as if to grab and drag him, shimmies down in the bed until he is lying flat on his back. “Spread your legs.” This Cuthbert does, and Steven moves to kneel between them.

Now, Steven touches him. He runs one hand up the inside of Cuthbert’s thigh, all the way up to where it meets his hip, and then reaches out to rub his thumb along his slit. It is shocking in its suddenness. There is no warning, no period of touching anywhere else to ease him in to being handled so intimately. Cuthbert cannot say he would prefer to be groped at length, but neither does he care for the sudden invasion of the man’s calloused thumb against his most private parts. No one else has touched him there since he grew old enough to bathe himself.

Reflexively, he tries to squeeze his legs shut. Steven’s knees are in the way, though. As if that weren’t enough, Steven reaches down and grips his thigh with his free hand, squeezing so hard his fingertips disappear into the soft flesh there, and pushes it outward far enough to strain the joint of Cuthbert’s hip.

“I don’t wish this to be unpleasant for you,” Steven says. His thumb still works between Cuthbert’s legs, pressing inside of him now, where he has hardly even sent his own fingers exploring more than a time or two. It is deeply unpleasant. “I hear from your teachers and your father that you’re a clever lad, so surely it is not beyond you to lie still and spread your legs for a few minutes.”

Cuthbert glances up at his face. His gaze is fixed between Cuthbert’s legs, his eyes intent, his lips parted slightly, just enough that Cuthbert can see the tip of his tongue. He pulls his thumb out and spreads Cuthbert’s lips apart with his fingers, exposing him as thoroughly as he can be with his skin still on, and the tip of his tongue flicks out against his upper lip. Cuthbert looks up at the bed canopy, throat tight.

He is not allowed that reprieve for long. Moments later, Steven puts his fingers to Cuthbert’s mouth, pressing them in. Once more Cuthbert glances at his face, and then once more he sends his gaze back to the canopy, and does what Steven wishes. He opens his mouth and lets the man thrust his fingers inside, and - taking a guess - closes his lips around them to suck as well as he can and lave them with his tongue. Steven’s fingers are calloused and rough in the softness of his mouth, and the way they poke at the back of his throat makes him want to gag. So does the low, pleased sound that comes sighing out of Steven when he sucks.

Steven pulls his fingers free as abruptly as he’d pushed them in, with an obscene wet noise. Then he shoves them both back inside Cuthbert’s body, down between his legs, with as little ceremony as he’s done any of the rest of it.

Biting back a whimper, Cuthbert forces himself to be still. This, he’s done, at least - and he knows he has no maidenhead to speak of, not with all the years he’s spent learning to ride - if not often, but his own hands are smaller and his fingers slimmer. Steven’s are large and rough and it hurts, not terribly but in a tight, burning sort of way.

The fingers might not be so bad, but those two fingers together aren’t as large as Steven’s cock. That’s what he means to put inside him, Cuthbert cannot keep himself from knowing now. Panic rises in him, hot and choking. He understands in some limited way the mechanics of the act - he’d begged the details of his evening with a whore from Roland - but he cannot imagine that he has room inside himself for the ugly thing jutting out from between Steven’s legs. It’s grown even larger and more deeply flushed, almost angrily so. Cuthbert imagines it battering its way into him and his breath hitches.

“Sai - Sai Deschain,” he whispers, hating himself for asking, unable to hold the words back, “please - is it - is it going to hurt?” 

When he meets Steven’s eyes, there is not a glimpse of pity in them, though there is amusement. “A bit, perhaps, since it’s your first time. Less if you relax. I’ve no wish to fuck you dry.” All the while his fingers slide in and out, in and out, while his thumb rubs busily at the sweet nub of flesh at the top of his sex. True enough, Cuthbert is - in spite of himself - getting wet, his own body easing the slide of Steven’s fingers. 

The painful stretch has eased, at least, by the time Steven pulls his fingers free. He wipes them against the inside of Cuthbert’s thigh, all sticky-wet, and then shifts his position once more, bracing himself with one hand beside Cuthbert’s head and lowering his hips down towards Cuthbert’s.

The blunt tip of his cock prods against Cuthbert, leaving a wet smear in the crease of one thigh. Steven reaches down between them with his other hand and takes hold of himself to guide it. First he rubs the head of it up and down between Cuthbert’s lips - and how he hates the spark of pleasure that comes when the head drags over that nub of his! - and then presses it firmly to his entrance and pushes in.

It does hurt, though not as badly as he’d feared. Worse is the alien sensation of being  _ filled _ , the way he is aware of the thing inside of him, all hot and hard and throbbing with Steven’s pulse. Worse is the way his body clenches around it, pulling it in deeper, welcoming it as if it were made for this - he supposes, in a way, it was. Worse is the weight of the man on top of him, how close their faces suddenly are, how he has no choice but to hear the slow and satisfied moan Steven gives as he slides his cock in.

Steven is still for a moment, perhaps letting Cuthbert adjust to it, and then begins to move. It is not so bad at first. Cuthbert is not wholly unaroused, despite how little he wants any of this to be happening, how sick and feverish and trembly he feels in his throat and head and heart, and Steven’s cock slides in and out of him easily enough. There is even a vague sense of satisfaction to that feeling, of it pulling out and pushing back in again. He thinks mayhap he could enjoy this at a different time, with someone else.

But soon enough it starts to hurt. The rhythm of Steven’s hips picks up; soon he is not merely rocking atop Cuthbert but thrusting hard and fast, the sound of their skin smacking together echoing off the walls. His cock is long and with every thrust it hits something deep inside that feels at first sore, then bruised, and then deeply and tenderly painful. Cuthbert tries to lay still as he was told, but it hurts so badly, like a fist being pounded into a bruise over and over again. He squirms and pushes at the bed with his feet, trying to pull back up away from the thing battering at his insides. 

Steven simply follows him, and when at one particularly hard thrust he cries out and tries to sit up, Steven takes him by the shoulders and pushes him down, resting his weight on him like that. Terrified, mind consumed by visions of some vital internal part being punctured, Cuthbert bucks and writhes beneath him. He no longer cares that the man on top of him is dinh of all Gilead as well as Roland’s father. He no longer cares that he might be exiled or executed. He can think only of the sick and grasping pain rising up into the pit of his belly.

It goes on for an eternity. When it becomes clear to Cuthbert that he won’t be able to struggle free - for Steven is heavier than he is and stronger too, despite his starveling appearance - he squeezes his eyes shut tight and lets his head drop back and tries to go away inside his own mind. He seeks out that cold and empty place in his own mind that Cort has taught all his pupils to find, the one he knows to go to during battle. In that place he barely feels his own body, and in that place he is not afraid or sick or horrified.

He can’t find it, though. The more desperately he reaches for it, the more it recedes from him, and the more aware he is forced to be of the sensations of his body. 

And then, finally, it’s over. Steven pushes into him hard and stays there, stiff and trembling atop him while his cock stiffens and trembles inside him. There is a sudden flood of wet warmth inside. When Steven pulls slowly out, it comes trickling down out of him.

Steven rolls off of him and onto his back, heaving a satisfied sigh. Their shoulders are touching, and their arms. Somehow that touch is even more unbearable than the rest of it. Though Cuthbert feels exhausted beyond all reason, and aches in his body, he wills himself upright enough that the two of them are no longer quite touching.

“Do I have your leave to go, sai?” he asks dully.

“If you wish,” says Steven, voice heavy now with a satiated sort of lassitude. Cuthbert cannot imagine the man thinks he might wish anything else. He does have to wonder, though, with fascinated horror, if Steven is imagining that the two of them would sleep together in this bed after what just happened.

The pain hits him even worse when he slides out of bed. He doubles over briefly, clutching at his belly with one hand. The slow trickle becomes a wet and sticky gush. He’s sure it must be his life’s blood, and cannot bring himself to look and see the truth. He walks slowly, with hitching steps, into the sitting room, and pulls his clothing on, not bothering to tuck his shirt in or do all the buttons on his pants.

Halfway across the grounds and to the novice barracks, he stumbles against a wall and finally loses the battle with his rising nausea. Everything he had for supper comes rising up his throat all at once in a hot and acrid rush, some of it still disgustingly recognizable. He heaves himself empty and then keeps staggering grimly onwards, eyes running and nose burning.

As a ‘prentice, he’d slept on the top bunk in a room full of rows of similar such beds, surrounded by all forty-odd of his classmates. Novices are granted their own rooms. Narrow and charmless as prison cells, the rooms are - Cuthbert recalls that, in fact, he had made some jest that promotion was punishment to a gunslinger, when he and Alain had been shown to their new accommodations - but they are enclosed and private. Cuthbert needn’t worry about being seen on his way in, nor questioned. 

He wants nothing more than to crawl into bed with his clothes on and wait to see if he’s going to bleed to death in his sleep. Between his legs is a sticky, slimy mess which slides against his skin with every step, so that he cannot stop being aware of it. Waves of pain cramp at his guts. He is sure he must be bleeding and sure that he must, as well, be all wet and covered with Steven’s spend. As little as he wants to do anything, he cannot bear the thought of lying down and letting it dry on his skin.   


So he strips down and gingerly wipes himself off, using the water in the carafe beside his bed and his shirt as a rag. A lot of blood comes up, along with some sticky clearer matter. Once the mess is wiped away he does not feel quite so filthy, but he does still feel very raw. He drops his soiled shirt to the floor and pushes the whole lot of it under his narrow bed. Before he crawls between the sheets, he puts on a new pair of drawers and a fresh slinkum shirt.

\---

The next day, he awakens to find he has not bled to death in his sleep. The pain has not abated, though; if anything, it is worse. He curls around his aching belly and lies, groaning, on the cusp between awake and asleep, until his door is opened.

There is a clearing of the throat, and a soft yet pointed cough. Just as pointedly, Cuthbert pretends to still be asleep. A moment of silence follows, during which he almost drifts away, and then a hand descends upon his shoulder and begins to shake him.

His eyes fly open. He is sure, for a moment, he will see Steven standing over him, naked again with his cock sticking out all flushed and randy and ready - but it is just Master Vannay, frowning down at him.

“Cuthbert Allgood,” the old man asks, “what excuse do you have for sleeping through my lessons, hm? Surely you do not think your recent elevation makes you exempt from the need to learn more of the academic arts. I have found you at times a difficult student, young man, but never a poor one.”

Master Vannay has little more patience for Cuthbert’s jackanapes antics than Cort ever has. It is clear from the set of his mouth and the tone of his voice that he believes this to be more of the same.

Cuthbert wishes dearly he could simply sink through the mattress and the floor and the earth itself, all the way down to hell. “I’m sick,” he tells Vannay, feeling every bit as pitiful as he is.

Vannay raises his bushy white brows sardonically. “Sick, is it? And sick with what, I wonder? A sudden allergy to history, perhaps, or an intolerance of the sciences?” He looks Cuthbert up and down, taking all of him in and frowning even more deeply. “Or perhaps a more mundane sort of illness, one preceding from an overindulgence in spirits and a youthful disregard for the need to wake up early in the morning? Is that it? Were you out carousing last night, perhaps engaging with some of the local ruffians? I shan’t give you a pass just because you were foolish. Get up, now, and stop malingering.”

“I’m not malingering,” Cuthbert protests. “And I wasn’t out drinking or fighting or - or anything. I’m simply sick.” He does not feel he can stay curled in bed any longer, though, without risk of the old man trying to haul him to his feet. If Vannay grabs at him, he is not honestly sure what he might do. So he slides his legs out of bed and stands, swaying and hunched over, and then all at once starts retching. Everything solid already came up last night, so all he manages to do is drool acid and froth onto the floor between them.

It is, still, enough to convince Vannay that he is unwell. He takes Cuthbert by the shoulder - by the upper arm, in fact, curiously gently - and puts a hand beneath his chin to tilt his head back, looking into his face.

“I told you,” Cuthbert mutters, sniffing. He feels as if someone is stirring his guts with a hot poker.

“If you’re truly ill, lad,” says Vannay, with somewhat more sympathy, “then you ought to see the doctor. Shall I have him fetched?”

“No!” Cuthbert blurts. Then he is left groping for some explanation that will make his vehement refusal seem sensible, for he cannot exactly tell Vannay that he doesn’t wish to see the doctor because the doctor might well know exactly what is wrong. Nor can he tell Vannay that he cannot bear the thought of those pale, grey eyes on him. In Jamie’s face those eyes are simply intense and striking; in his father’s they look as if he is already seeing you without your clothes on. “It - it is no true sickness, Master Vannay, cry pardon, except for if you call what every woman bears each month a sickness. I don’t believe any man has yet found a cure for that, leastwise not one I wish to take.”

He hates to do that. He does not make mention of his differences. It is weak to hide behind the excuse of his womanly parts, almost as bad as hiding behind his mother’s skirts. Perhaps a noble lady might retire to her chambers for a day or two due to female troubles, but he is no woman; he is a gunslinger, a son of Gilead, and made of stronger stuff. Such did he declare all those years ago, and it galls him now to say such words.

Gall him though it may, it also works. Vannay lets him go and takes a step back, and comes over near as awkward as his classmates do. He hides it better, though, being an older and more worldly man.

“Well,” he says, and clears his throat. “I’ll give you the morning, then, and send one of your mates over after lessons with something for the pain. I’ll want to see you this afternoon, though. All you need do is sit and listen, and discomfort is no excuse.” With that he turns and leaves in some haste.

It is as if, Cuthbert thinks with bitter weariness, they all think having a cunt is contagious. Still, he will take whatever time he is given. Once the door has closed and Vannay’s limping footsteps retreated down the hall, he skims his drawers down to assess the damage this morning.

He’s bled more, though not as much as last night. He cleans himself off as best he can without going to fetch more water. There is a fantastic bruise mottling his thigh where Steven grabbed at him, and two more where the man’s hands had rested on his shoulders, holding him down. They show quite well beyond the straps of his slinkum, which is perhaps why Master Vannay thought he had been in a fight.

Whoever might be coming by later, it won’t do to have them seeing. He pulls on a shirt with sleeves, then gets back into bed and lets sleep take him.

Some hours later, he is dragged once more out of the swampy clutches of a nightmare. This time it is Alain’s face peering down at him, round and worried. He hands over a draught that Master Vannay made, which goes some way to settling Cuthbert’s stomach and dulling the pain. 

“What is it ails thee, Bert?” Alain asks softly as he walks Cuthbert back to the schoolroom. Cuthbert has been avoiding his worried eyes and the cobweb-soft brush of his touch, but he finds he cannot pretend he did not hear the question.

For one terrible moment, he thinks of telling Alain the truth. The words sit on the very tip of his tongue, ready to come tripping out past his lips into the air. They are so heavy when he swallows them back down. They stick in his throat, and for a time he cannot speak. Then he says, rough but trying to sound bright, “Why, I was out until a truly ludicrous hour of the night drinking, and I started a tavern fight. Don’t tell Master Vannay. He thinks me ill.”

Alain is not convinced, perhaps, but he does not push any further that Cuthbert can tell, and that is good enough.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this has kind of turned into a whole thing, as my projects often do. Please mind the updated warnings. This is not a happy story and good things do not happen.

“So,” Lavinia Allgood asks, smiling across the table, “how have your lessons gone?” 

It is the typical Restday question. Such days have followed the same formula for as long as Cuthbert can remember: the day before, his mother will prepare a lunch and dinner that can be eaten cold, for there is traditionally to be no cooking done on such a day, and then the whole family will gather together to eat them. Jamie too, for it is one of the only times he can be reliably rounded up. If the weather holds fair, they might go for a walk to one of the various spots on the castle grounds which his mother enjoys, and eat there. If not, like today, then they eat at the sturdy old dining table in the family apartments.

Cuthbert swallows hastily and grins back at her. “Well and well enough, on my part! Al and I are showing those old men in our classes what it’s about, to be sure. ‘Twas his father had us this past week, so I don’t believe the poor boy’s had a moment’s rest.” With Cort still incapacitated from that last fight with Roland - and looking to not ever recover enough to take on teaching fresh crops of boys, either - the elder gunslingers have been taking turns at filling his place. Christopher Johns is a touch more impatient than old Cort had been, and near as free with the back of his hand or the lash of his tongue, though since he’s only had them a handful of weeks rather than since boyhood, none of them are as awed by him - except possibly Alain himself.

“I shouldn’t think the poor man’s had a moment’s rest either,” says Lavinia. She props her chin on her fist and looks pointedly at Cuthbert. “I had his lady wife and dear Melisende over to dinner two nights past - she brought her little boy, as well, just learning to toddle about, he is - and when I asked if he had aught to say of my dear son, why, you will be shocked to learn I was told he finds you to be a bit of a jokester, and mouthy besides.” Her dark eyes glitter with good humor.

Cuthbert fights back a grin and puts on the blandest face that he possibly can. “Did he say so? Why, I am shocked to hear it as well. I’ve been on my absolute best behavior, especially being as he is the father of one of my dearest friends.”

“It would well please us if you took yourself a bit more seriously,” puts in his father, sighing a bit, “now that you’ve graduated to novice. The ability to behave as befits a man in any situation is part and parcel of being a gunslinger, as much so as being able to shoot well.”

“Yes, Father,” Cuthbert says, though he still holds his mother’s amused gaze. He may be the very spit of his father in looks, but it’s from his mother he takes most of his character. This part of the conversation is as much a ritual as the rest of it, and so he does not take it much to heart. He will be as he is, for what other choice is there before him? He knows his own worth, as do his ka-tet and, most importantly, the boy who will soon enough be his dinh, and so it matters not whether Christopher Johns thinks him mouthy and irreverent, nor even overmuch if his own father agrees.

Her born son duly seen to, Lavinia turns her gaze on Jamie. “And what about you, Jay? What progress have you to report?”

Eloquent as always, Jamie shrugs. 

“I’ve heard quite well of him,” Robert puts in. Pointedly, perhaps. All of their teachers have always been quite fond of quiet, clever Jamie. Cuthbert does not begrudge him this, for it seems to him it must be terribly dull to be all stuck in one’s own head that way. “Chris says he showed himself well when they had that archery contest last week, better even than many of the older boys in the novice classes.”

“He gave a speech the other day, too, he did,” Cuthbert says brightly.

Jamie glances sidelong at him. “Answered a question,” he says. “That Master Vannay asked.”

“Out loud and everything! Two whole sentences he spoke, I believe. I was quite proud of him.” Cuthbert leans over and delivers a friendly punch into Jamie’s narrow shoulder, earning himself another cool grey-eyed glance.

From there he asks his mother how the preparations for the year’s end feast are going, for she is quite involved in them. While she speaks of the seating arrangements and usual arguments over the meal and its courses and what entertainments might be offered - and his father interjects what he knows of the preparations to pass on the guns to Cuthbert and Alain both - he continues eating, letting the sound of their voices wash over him.

It is all so queerly normal. As the meal and the conversation both continue, Cuthbert’s sense that he is in some mundanely realistic dream grows, so much so he is quite tempted to do something ridiculous - hop on the table and begin to sing, perhaps, or begin hurling food about, or simply get up and toss himself out the window, to see if it is perhaps a flying dream. Those he is especially fond of.

From where inside him the normal cheerful chatter comes, he is not sure. He simply opens up his mouth and lets the words fall out, and blessedly only has to choke back any mention of the other night once or twice. That seems to have perhaps been a dream itself. Even the soreness has faded, now, to a distant ache which only comes when he strains the muscles of his groin, so he sits easily enough and does not fidget or shift any more than is usual for him. 

Five days ago, that had been. Ever since he’s stayed in his room in the barracks when not at lessons, and contrived to travel with a friend or classmate to and from whenever he must. Of Steven Deschain he has not seen nor heard a thing. Though logic and reason assert he can’t spend the rest of his life creeping about the castle in groups and avoiding his own liege, it’s so far been quite a successful strategy.

All goes well enough until, once the dishes have been cleared away and they’re all drifting off to their usual haunts, his mother takes him by the elbow and leads him a short way down the hall, towards his own room.

“Oh, dear son of mine,” she says softly, once they are out of earshot of his father, “art thou feeling well?”

“Well as well can be,” he says lightly back, though there is a spreading coldness in his chest. “Whyever would I not be?”

“Abel Vannay passed on the me that you skipped a morning of lessons due to -” a small but significant pause - “sickness. If you are so troubled in that respect that it’s causing you to miss your lessons, well, there are solutions, and perhaps might be a good idea for you to see the doctor -”

“Oh, no,” Cuthbert cuts in, smiling a little desperately. “I don’t think such is necessary, not at all. ‘Twas only the first few hours that it came upon me, and no doubt I’m simply unused to such discomforts. Fear not, I shall learn to bear up under it in time. I wouldn’t wish to put you or the good doctor to any trouble about such a thing, I surely would not.”

His mother looks steadily at him, clearly not wholly convinced. “That you should see him is not my first choice, especially for such an intimate concern. You know well enough that man is not welcome in these quarters nor in the company of either you or Jamie. But if you’re having troubles -”

“I am not, mother, truly.” He takes both of her hands in his and fixes her with the most sincere gaze he can muster. “I told Alain this as well, but I had been out late that night, getting up to mischief, and underestimated my own capacity. ‘Twas a foolish mistake, I know, and not worthy of a man or a gunslinger, and I do not intend to make it again.”

She gives his hands a squeeze. “If you say so, then I believe so.”

\---

It is another week before he encounters Steven again. In that time he has well enough convinced himself that if the incident did happen the way he remembered it happening - and it has such a queer quality in his recall, now, most of it being fuddled and fragmented while certain aspects are terribly clear - it will not happen again. A series of tentative forays into various parts of the castle on his own has further convinced him that he need not worry.

He’s in the central library. Gilead’s, he is sure, is the largest in the whole Affiliation of Baronies, and he has always loved it. As a small boy, the vaulted ceiling had seemed to soar away into the very heavens themselves, and the many-colored light from the glorious stained glass windows had seemed to surely be the light of God himself shining upon the accumulated richness of knowledge contained within the shelves. The dry and dusty smell of so many books and scrolls held in one place instantly transports him back to the state of being an over-awed little boy exploring a room which seemed infinite.

Today he is at one of his favorite activities, which is to simply select a book at random and see how long it will hold his attention for. The one he’s picked proves to be some old war diary, and the fellow who wrote it has a wry turn of phrase that Cuthbert quite enjoys. He is so deep into the description of a mightily bungled engagement he doesn’t entirely notice when someone sits down beside him, other than to take note of another body in his vicinity, until a hand quite suddenly and familiarly insinuates itself onto his knee.

He looks up from his book into Steven’s face, and all the sharp words he’d had ready wither away on his tongue. He feels very small and still, all of a sudden, much the way he imagines a rabbit must when the shadow of a hawk falls over it.

“Are you in here studying in your free hours?” Steven asks. “I would not have thought you so diligent a student.”

“I do quite well in my schoolroom lessons,” Cuthbert says back, inanely. The man’s hand on his knee is like a burning stone. He is rooted in place, though he badly wishes to rise and leave. Perhaps he can make some excuse - say that he is meant to meet his lady mother and was just leaving - but no such words come to him, and he cannot move. “This is simply for entertainment.”

“Is that so?” Steven takes the book from Cuthbert’s unaccountably numb, nerveless hands, flips carelessly through a handful of pages, and then sets it aside. “I’ve come seeking entertainment as well, though of a somewhat different sort.”

“Sai Deschain,” says Cuthbert weakly, knowing it for an impotent protest even as he speaks, “we are in the Great Library, where anyone might come by…” 

Steven glances about them. There are no people nearby, nor even distant voices, nor even the muffled sound of footsteps on the carpets covering the library’s floors. His eyes settle back on Cuthbert, and he raises his eyebrows. “You seem to have picked quite a private place to do your reading. I don’t intend to be at this business long, either.”

Cuthbert is sure, too, that the man could fuck him in the main square of town, and no one would speak a word about it. He is dinh, and it is not for Cuthbert or anyone else to question him.

He spoke true, at least, when he said he did not wish to be long about his business. This time he does not make Cuthbert strip, but merely bends him over one of the tables, tugs his jeans and drawers down around his knees, and opens his own trousers just enough to get his cock out. It hurts more than the first time did, though not in the same way; there is no such rough preparation as he was given last time, and he is profoundly unaroused, and thus dry and tight. It seems to make no difference to Steven’s pleasure. 

Near the end, Steven worms a hand up beneath Cuthbert’s shirt to grope at his chest. There is, in truth, not much for him to grab, but he squeezes at what flesh is there and pinches and pulls at Cuthbert’s nipple, breathing heavily into his ear. Cuthbert cannot keep himself from jerking at the sudden touch, pinned though he is between Steven’s weight and the table. It puts him in mind of an early evening in Hambry, when he and Alain had been left alone while Roland rolled about in the hay with his girl - they’d occupied themselves with kissing, and he’d ended up sitting in Alain’s lap with Alain’s hands up his shirt, though Alain had touched him gently and with hesitance, his palms and thick fingers sweaty and sticking to Cuthbert’s hot skin. 

He does not wish to think of that at this time. The memory is arousing, and in remembering it he finds that Steven’s grabbing becomes more enjoyable as well, which in turn eases the dry slide of the man’s cock in him. He does not wish for any part of it to be enjoyable, but he doesn’t wish to go back to his cell in the novice barracks torn and bleeding, either. 

In the throes of his climax, Steven thrusts against him with such force the table goes shuddering across the ground. Cuthbert is shoved into the edge of it hard enough to knock the breath from him. When Steven pulls out, it is small relief, for it is followed immediately by the skin-crawling slimy sensation of his spend dripping down Cuthbert’s thighs.

With slow and deliberate motions, not looking once at the man behind him, Cuthbert straightens up and readjusts his clothing. He tucks his shirt in carefully, plucking at the front of it to get it to sit right. Behind him he hears the rustle and snap of Steven pulling his own pants up and doing up his buttons.

“Tomorrow night, after supper, I wish to see you in my quarters,” Steven says.

And there is nothing else for Cuthbert to do save nod his head and say, “Yes, sai Deschain.”


	3. Chapter 3

It never quite becomes routine, which is almost the worst part. Cuthbert will go entire stretches of days in a row without seeing Steven, and then all at once encounter the man in a hallway or at a meal he must attend with his parents. Sometimes he is simply brought into a nearby room and taken swiftly, and other times Steven arranges for a more leisurely tryst in his own chambers. Steven is never overly rough with him, and Cuthbert’s body grows rapidly used to the physical act itself. Indeed, he even finds himself often becoming aroused by Steven’s brisk handling, which only makes it all the more easier.

At first, he still tries to avoid the man as much as possible.

He cannot spend all of his time hiding in his little room, if for no other reason than that such a departure from his usual gregarious ways is notable, and he has no suitable excuse for it. He tries to keep in the company of others when he can, but he is not particularly close with any of his fellow novices - indeed, they do not regard either him or Alain very warmly at all. They are seen largely as interlopers, younglings who bypassed the usual test of nerve-wracking public performance and were given an undeserved elevation of status, and kept firmly on the outskirts of the group. 

He tries, at first, to simply pass most of his time with Alain. He is under no illusions that should Steven come upon the two of them and call for him, he would be required at once to give way and leave Alain’s company, but even knowing so, being accompanied makes him feel much less like some hunted thing crawling about trying not to be noticed.

That plan, though, becomes quite shortly unworkable, and in quite a bitter fashion.

Their day was spent learning and practicing close-combat techniques. Among the older boys, Alain is no longer the stoutest or strongest, though he held his own well enough. Lanky Cuthbert is not nearly so well muscled, though slipperier. They are both bruised and sore and weary in the manner of men who have spent all day at taxing work, and there is a curious tension between them, for their last match had been against each other.

Cuthbert is thinking of their intimate encounters in Hambry. He does not know if Alain is, though he suspects so. He goes to no lengths at all to close his mind up. He quite wants Alain to pick the thought up from his brain, in fact.

It had only happened a handful of times, all unplanned. Since returning, they haven’t spoken of it at all, but there is a hunger between them. His own body yearns for Alain’s the way it does for water on a hot day whenever they are near enough to each other, yearns to touch and see as much of Alain as can be, and to be touched and seen and wanted as well. 

Tonight they head back to the barracks together, both sharing the thought that they are tired and do not wish to try and tag along with the larger group of novices to go carousing in the low town. Unconsciously, they head together to Cuthbert’s room, and it is only after Cuthbert has kicked the door closed and flopped down on his bed beside Alain that he realizes how close together and private they are.

He glances up at Alain. Alain is fixedly not looking at him. His hands are on his knees, gripping too tightly to seem casual. Cuthbert sits up, leaning against the solid warmth of Alain’s body, and hears his breath stutter.

Experimentally, he lays his head against Alain’s shoulder, though he has to slouch a bit to do so. He’s most of his man’s height already, and Alain is like to be short even when he’s fully grown, if his father and sisters are any indication. 

Alain goes very still, and then, moving as if he thinks Cuthbert might up and run away at any moment, turns his own head to nose at his hair, inhaling deeply.

Cuthbert puts his arm around Alain’s waist and turns his head, so that suddenly they’re nearly nose to nose - or nose to mouth, more like, for the angle he’s at makes it somewhat awkward. Alain practically stops breathing, flushing immediately red, and starts to shift away.

“Oh, nay,” says Cuthbert softly, squeezing his hip. “I don’t wish for you to leave.” And after that, it is very easy. Alain must be well inside his mind, for though they do not exactly speak, he has a sense nonetheless of an understanding passing between them - the knowledge of what they both want, of what they wish to do, of the tangled knot of nervousness and yearning and eagerness - and they arrange themselves around each other quite well.

The bed is not wide enough for the two of them to lay side by side, and so Cuthbert ends up straddling Alain and bent over to kiss him. Every so often, a flash will come to him of what he’s been doing with Steven Deschain, but it is easy enough to push away. Alain is not that man. Alain does not look or sound or feel like that man, or touch him like that man, or want him like that man. 

There is one bad moment, where Alain slides a hand up his shirt, along his belly and chest, and he thinks of thinking of when they’d done that in Hambry while Steven took him in the library, and Alain asks, breathlessly, “Who is that you’re trying not to think of, Bert?”

Cuthbert goes cold all over, his growing arousal curdling in his gut. Only for a moment, though, and then he says back, “No one real at all, but simply a very strange dream I had a handful of nights. ‘Twas of Cort, if you can credit, and -”

Groaning, Alain puts a hand over his mouth. “I wish neither to hear nor imagine that, thank you very much,” he says. 

It goes very well, until it doesn’t. Alain rests a hand on Cuthbert’s narrow hip, and then quite daringly slides it around to squeeze at his ass. The touch is not unwelcome, but it brings a twinge of pain that reminds Cuthbert, all of a sudden, that he is bruised there. He had been with Steven just last evening, another one of the surprise encounters where he was simply pulled into a nearby room and bent over the most handy piece of furniture and taken, and the buckle of Steven’s belt had dug into the place where his cheek met his thigh.

Moreover, the grip of Steven’s hands left little fingertip-sized bruises on his hips as well. How might he explain any of it to Alain? What words might come tripping off his tongue, should Alain ask? Worse, what thoughts might float up to the surface of his mind? 

A roaring blank panic takes over his mind. Sensing it easily, Alain removes his hand and props himself up on his elbows, frowning up in concern. “Bert,” he asks, “what -”

“‘Tis nothing,” Cuthbert says. He makes himself bend to kiss Alain once more, though his ardor is well and truly quenched. He plans to carry on a few moments longer, and then make an excuse -

Except Alain does not buy it, not for a moment. He puts his hands to Cuthbert’s shoulders and pushes him firmly away, then holds onto him, looking into his eyes. “Something is wrong. Don’t try and lie to me about it.”

“It’s not - nothing is  _ wrong _ . I am simply tired, and realized we oughtn’t have dallied like this with lessons on the morrow.” It is a weak excuse, and he can see in Alain’s face that he does not believe it. “Alain, thou’rt very dear to me, and I find thee passing fair as well, it is not -”

“Oh,” Alain interrupts, “don’t  _ thee _ and  _ thou _ at me when you’re lying, Bert, please.” He is more hurt and bewildered than angry, and there is still a good helping of concern there in his sweet round face and wide blue eyes. “If you don’t wish for us to continue, ‘tis enough to say so and not pretend to try and spare my feelings.”

“I do,” Cuthbert protests, because he truly does. He wants it very badly. It is simply that he cannot have it, and he cannot explain why, and he cannot bear to see that look on Alain’s face. Alain, he knows, hates when folk tell him well-meaning lies, for he can see into their heads and know the truth anyway. “I am very tired, and sorer than I thought from our lessons, how about that? I wish to lay about in bed and go to sleep at a disgustingly early hour. ‘Tis naught to do with how desirable I may find you.”

And so Alain leaves, unconvinced. Cuthbert lies in bed, frustrated in every sense, up until the early hours of the morning.

\---

After that, he takes care not to be too alone with Alain, for he doesn’t trust himself not to fall prey to that desire. Alain allows him that distance, unhappy though he is about it. It is a blessing, for Steven only wants him more and more often, and arranges for him to visit most nights of the week. Even when his passion does not leave marks, Cuthbert does not relish the thought of going directly from one man’s bed to another’s. Nor does he wish to reveal how much he knows of the act of love - if what he submits to with Steven can be so called. 

It does not become routine, but it becomes normal. Cuthbert becomes almost unconscious of the way he balances the two halves of his life. Steven is discreet enough, for even if no one could tell him off for it, it would be seen as rather shameful for the married dinh of Gilead to be carrying on so with one of his ka-mates’ sons. More shameful for Cuthbert to be used so, of course, but Steven would not be regarded as blameless.

Which is why it comes as such a shock to him when, one evening, as he is getting ready to slide out of Steven’s bed, the man sits up and takes hold of his wrist.

Cuthbert freezes, looking back over his shoulder at him. He is well used to being handled, now, and letting his body be moved and positioned how Steven wants it. It is a deviation, though, to be touched once Steven has had his pleasure.

“Cuthbert,” Steven says. Another deviation; Cuthbert thinks it is perhaps the first time the man has called him by name during one of these encounters. 

“Yes, sai?”

“Stay, why don’t you?”

Cuthbert gapes at him. Before he can even think of what a terrible idea it is to speak so to his dinh, he hisses, “Are you  _ mad _ ?”

Clearly Steven is as taken aback by being spoken to in such a manner as Cuthbert is by having done it. And perhaps he is still feeling good from the fuck he just had, for though he frowns thunderously and tightens his grip on Cuthbert’s elbow, he would be well justified in back-handing him to the ground for such impertinence. “You forget yourself.”

Cuthbert draws in a breath, and tries to make himself be calm. He bows his head, and puts his other fist to his forehead in salute. “My liege. You are right, I do. I did not mean to speak to you so. Only… It would be unseemly beyond all thought for me to spend the night in your quarters. What should Roland think, if he saw me leaving your room in the morning?”

“Roland stays locked in his chambers, grieving his lost gilly-girl,” says Steven. “Your concern for my reputation is touching, truly, but it is not yours to concern yourself with. You should be honored -”

“And mine own reputation?” Cuthbert interrupts boldly, raising his head to look the man in the eyes. “An honor it may be, but think of my father, who is ka-tet to you and serves you well and faithfully. How would he feel to find me so honored, I wonder? And what of your lady wife? Should not you be honoring her?” It is the wrong thing to say, he realizes immediately.

True anger, now, flashes across Steven’s face. He lets go of Cuthbert’s wrist and shoves him, hard, sending him spilling out of the bed and onto the floor. “You will not speak of her,” he grits out. “Leave, now, while I am in a good enough mood to forgive your disobedience.”

Gathering up his clothes in an awkward armful, Cuthbert leaves.

\---

Three days later, Alain corners him after lessons, and says that they must attend to Roland.

“Attend to him how, exactly?” Cuthbert asks. “For he won’t see me anymore than he will you, unless you’ve some hold on him I’m not aware of.”

“That’s exactly why,” Alain says. “He’s been cooped up in his room staring into that forsaken glass ball for weeks. We’ve got to take it from him. Any longer and it’s going to just suck the life right out of him.” And a brush against his mind, an image: the old witch Rhea as they’d last seen her, scrawny and sore-raddled and dying, sucked dry by the same ball that now had Roland in its clutches. 

“And how are we to do that? You practically knocked his brains out last time, and it did less than naught.”

Alain shrugs, mutely. His earnest, worried gaze makes it clear, though, that they have to try.

And truly, Cuthbert believes so as well. He has been much preoccupied since they came back, and has perhaps carried a dim hope that Roland might voluntarily return from his self-imposed isolation once his grief has run dry. Obviously, that is not going to happen.

“What shall we do if he refuses to give the thing up, though?” Cuthbert asks as they approach the Deschain apartments. His stomach is twisting curiously about itself as they get close. He’s been in these chambers hundreds of times during his life, mostly to visit Roland, but just now all he can think about is the worry he might meet Steven. He has seen the man a number of times since their last tryst, a time or two even quite close up, but Steven has pointedly ignored him. There have been no further requests to join him in his chambers. Cuthbert ought to be glad, but the overall feeling is one of watching a bank of thunderheads roll in and simply waiting for the storm to break.

“I don’t know,” Alain whispers back. “Go to sai Deschain, I suppose.”

At that, Cuthbert’s stomach does a lazy, nauseous flip inside of him. He says nothing, though. They are nearly at Roland’s door, with no sign of his father.

The door is locked. They knock and call for Roland, quite loudly, with no response. Eventually Alain pulls a slim roll of lock-picks from his pocket - where he got such a thing from, Cuthbert has no idea, though he admires the foresight - and begins working at the lock.

“It doesn’t feel quite right,” Cuthbert whispers, “to be breaking into his room like this.”

“It feels less right to let that thing eat him,” Alain says back grimly.

When he finally has the door open, neither of them entirely wants to open it. They glance at each other, neither wanting to be the first to intrude, until finally Alain visibly steels himself and does it. He pushes it open just far enough to slide inside, even sucking his gut in to minimize his own breadth. Cuthbert follows a moment later.

The room is dark and foul. The curtains are drawn and the air reeks of unwashed body and overflowing chamberpots. The only light is a pulsing, pink glow. In that eerie light, the dark lump of Roland’s gaunt body is silhouetted. He sits on the edge of the bed, naked and nearly skeletal, hunched over the ball.

Cuthbert and Alain exchange another look. Swallowing, Cuthbert steps forward, reaching out to touch Roland’s shoulder. His bare skin is greasy and unpleasantly cold. He does not respond to being touched.

Alain goes around in front of him and goes to one knee. Gently, he slides his hand between Roland’s face and the ball, and then tries to tug it away.

That, at least, gains a response. Roland shudders and  _ hisses _ , clutching the ball to his chest - or trying to, at any rate. He is terribly wasted, though, and Alain is very strong. There is a bit of a tussle, the two of them pink-washed shadows struggling near-silently in the fetid darkness of the chamber, and then at last Alain wrenches the horrid thing from Roland’s grip. It flares so bright as to dazzle the eyes, then goes dark all at once.

“Give it back,” Roland croaks. His words are barely recognizable as speech. “Give it -  give it back to me right now.”

“I shan’t,” Alain says firmly, backing away with the thing cradled against his chest. “It’s eating you alive.”

“I care not. I need it. I need to see -” He reaches out, fingers curled into claws, at once pitiful and frightening. “I need to see her. I have to see her. Give it  _ back _ .”

“Roland,” Cuthbert says quietly, squeezing his friend’s shoulder. His face is hot, his stomach roiling. To see Roland, normally so composed and dignified, even stern, in such a way - why, it’s simply terrible. “Come, now, surely you don’t wish to sit here and drown yourself in grief, do you?”

Roland turns and shoots Cuthbert such a poisonous look over his shoulder that Cuthbert recoils. 

“Whether you wish to or not,” Alain says, “I shan’t be giving it back. Either you can give it to your father, to whom it belongs, or we’ll take it to him ourselves.” Though he tries to keep his voice firm, Cuthbert can feel the undercurrent of horror in his thoughts. Neither of them wishes to confront Roland like this.

Roland looks between the two of them, eyes flat and unreadable. “How long,” he finally asks, “have the two of you been - been conspiring together so, then?”

“Oh, Roland -” Alain starts.

“It is no conspiracy,” Cuthbert says, stepping forward, though he does not reach out to touch Roland again. “We are simply concerned for you, Roland. We’ve not seen hide nor hair of you since we got back, is all. We come to you as friends -”

“Is that so?” Roland regards him with a terrible coldness, his lips peeling back from his teeth. “Do you say so? Do you say so to me, here, in this place, that you come to me as a friend? Do you truly think me such a fool?”

“I have no idea what you mean,” Cuthbert says, honestly enough, though his guts have suddenly all decided to sink down into his feet. For he remembers what the nasty thing in Alain’s hands does, yes, what it shows people - 

Roland’s lips curl back further. The expression cannot be called a smile. It is more like the rictus grin of a skinless skull. “Oh, yes, you do. It shows me what it will, and plenty has it shown me right here in this castle. At first I thought, why, it must be a mistake, it cannot be true - surely my dearest bosom friend would not betray me in such a manner.”

“Roland,” Cuthbert says, voice trembling, eyes hot, face hot. “Roland, I haven’t -”

“Shut up,” Roland says, very flatly. Cuthbert’s teeth snap together. “I’ve seen it, so there’s no use lying to me. I’ve seen you come to him time and time again - while I sat right here, just a short hallway away! At all hours of the day, whenever you had a moment’s time -” His voice is thick with anguish and fury, his eyes cold and dead. “While I was right here! When I’ve told you what I’ve told no one else, about my mother - how many times?” Suddenly he is speaking very softly, almost whispering, his eyes glinting in the dimness. Cuthbert and Alain both lean in towards him, unconsciously. “How many times have you fucked my father, Cuthbert? Did you spread for him before we even left for Hambry, or was his bed your reward for a job well done? Well?”

Cuthbert cannot speak into the ringing silence that follows. His tongue lays heavy and dead in his mouth. His heart does not beat, nor his lungs move. A feeling steals over him of being carven from stone, numb and motionless. He cannot look away from Roland’s accusing eyes.

“I am sure,” Alain says, very steadily, “that there is some explanation. You know that thing is malicious, Roland.”

“I know it shows the truth,” Roland snaps back. He does not look away from Cuthbert as he says, cruelly smug, “That’s why he doesn’t want you. It showed me that, as well. What need has he of someone like you when he’s fucking the dinh of Gilead?”

Cuthbert takes a step back, and then another. His hands clench into trembling fists. “It’s not as you say, Roland,” he says. Even to his own ears, it sounds a thin and pitiful excuse. 

“Do you deny the evidence of my own eyes? I trust not your lying whore’s mouth. Leave me. Leave!” Roland roars with all the force of will left within him - and even as wasted as he is, even still under the sway of whatever force lurks within the ball Alain is holding - which glimmers in its depths now, watching, yes, enjoying the way they’ve fallen to bickering among each other - his will is iron.

Cuthbert looks from him to Alain. There is no such fury or hate or disgust in Alain’s eyes, but there is hurt, yes, and even worse there is something that looks perhaps like pity - something that feels perhaps like pity in the brush of Alain’s touch against his mind, something like understanding - 

He turns his back upon his oldest and dearest friend and flees.

\---

He does not go back to his room in the barracks. No doubt Alain will be waiting for him there if he does, wanting to talk. There is nothing Cuthbert wishes to talk about with him, not now. He cannot avoid Alain forever, though perhaps if there is any force of mercy in the world Alain will decide to avoid him.

Instead he skulks about the castle until past moonrise, and then he heads back to the Deschain apartments. He casts a glance down the hall towards Roland’s room, but sees no evidence that anything has changed. Were Roland out and about, he might well have simply turned tail and left, but Roland is not.

So he goes the route which is now very familiar to him, and pushes open the door to Steven’s sitting room. Steven is there, bent over a sheaf of papers on his desk. At the sound of the door he jerks upright and turns, drawing and brandishing a pistol in one smooth movement too fast to see.

Cuthbert does not flinch or try to move away. Were Steven to put a bullet in his heart just now, he might call it a mercy.

“What are you doing here?” Steven asks. “Surely you know better than to intrude without being called for.”

“I wish to make my apologies, my liege,” says Cuthbert. He strides across the room, goes down on his knees beside Steven’s chair, and runs both hands up the man’s legs from knee to hip, coming to rest with his fingers and thumbs framing his crotch. There is no way to mistake his meaning, surely.

And, indeed, Steven does not. He reaches out and strokes a hand through Cuthbert’s hair, then takes a fistful of it and draws his face in closer, fumbling with his other hand at his own belt. “A most improper way to apologize for your impropriety,” he says, sounding almost amused, “but I do believe I will allow it.”

He has never done this before, but it is not difficult to grasp. Steven moves him about as need be, murmuring instructions. In this, as in many things, he is an apt pupil.

After he has tendered his apology, Cuthbert sits back on his bottom and, under Steven’s bemused gaze, removes his boots. Then he stands and strides towards Steven’s bedchamber, stripping as he goes. First his shirt, drawn over his head and dropped carelessly onto the ground; then he unbuckles his belt and unbuttons his pants.

“And what,” calls Steven, “do you think you are doing now?”

Cuthbert glances over his shoulder. “Why, I’d like to accept your proposition. I’ve been thinking on it, and you were correct. Your own reputation is not mine to mind, and as for mine own, why - I may be called a whore, but ‘tis an honor to be the whore of such a noble man as you, is it not?” He sits on the edge of the bed, kicks his pants and drawers off, and lays back.

Afterwards, when Steven rolls off him, Cuthbert follows him, laying his head on the man’s skinny chest and draping an arm across him. He has a momentary fear it is too much, that he has gone too far in his liberties - but then Steven curls his arm around Cuthbert’s shoulders and begins to stroke at his hair.

It is good to be so held, to be so touched. Cuthbert’s eyes grow heavy and fall closed, and he drifts off to sleep more easily and quickly than he has in weeks.

The next morning, he leaves Steven Deschain’s chambers dressed in the clothes he’d worn yesterday. He and Roland step out of their respective doors at almost the same time. Roland freezes in place. Cuthbert glances at him, then away, and keeps walking, head held up, and does not look back.


	4. Chapter 4

Gabrielle Deschain is dead, and Cuthbert is drunk.

The whole court is in mourning, as is only appropriate for a dead queen. Cuthbert and his family are more personally, as well, for she was his cousin; daughter of his father’s eldest half-sister from his grandfather’s first marriage. Thus was Roland his first cousin, once removed, and in better times - how it hurts to think of them! How distant they now seem! - he had been able to tease Roland into a fine fury by loftily addressing him as  _ young nephew _ .

She was buried a handful of days ago, with great ceremony and a fine turn-out. That event forced Roland and Cuthbert into uncomfortable proximity, being the larger part of her surviving family at court. At least Cuthbert had the buffer of his father there, and at least he was not expected to speak. Roland did not pay him much attention, but then, Roland did not pay anyone much attention. Roland seemed quite well absorbed in his own thoughts, all pale and hollow-eyed with grief.

It was after that that Cuthbert began drinking. And now here he is, the night of the mourning feast, having freely availed himself of the wine. He is making his slow and swaying way out of the dining hall when a hand falls heavy upon his shoulder, and at this point he does not need to turn around to see whose hand it is, for he knows the weight of that palm and the clutch of those fingers very well, he does. Steven has not wanted him since the death of his wife, but evidently he does not wish to spend this night alone.

“Come with me,” Steven says, and begins to steer him towards his own chambers.

Cuthbert is surprised, though he goes along. They are still well within view of the dining hall, and never before has Steven so directly called upon him where there might be witnesses. He glances over his shoulder, trying to see if Roland can see, hoping he cannot, but he sees nothing either way.

Their encounters have fallen into a familiar routine. Intimate though it may be, there is a distance between them during these times. Cuthbert comes into Steven’s room, strips himself down, and gets in bed; Steven climbs atop him, thrusts away, and finds his own pleasure. When they fall asleep together in the same bed, Cuthbert will seek some comfort in the warmth of the man’s body beside him, but there is no kissing, no caressing, no tenderness, no sweet whispered words. It suits Cuthbert just fine that it should be that way.

Tonight, though, it is different. When he starts to unbutton his own shirt, Steven takes his hands and draws them away. With quite unaccustomed care, he undoes each button and then slides the shirt itself from Cuthbert’s shoulders, leaving him standing there in his slinkum undershirt and trousers. 

It is not so much of a change, but suddenly Cuthbert feels as nervy and unsure of what is going to happen as he did that first time so long ago. He stands with his hands at his sides and, as usually serves him in these situations, simply lets Steven do as he wishes.

What Steven wishes, it seems, is to undress him. He draws the undershirt up over Cuthbert’s head - Cuthbert obediently raising his arms for it - and then runs his fingers down his chest and belly, to his belt. That he unbuckles and then draws from Cuthbert’s pants, before slowly unbuttoning each button. He slides the pants down, and then the drawers, and Cuthbert steps out of both and stands there naked before his dinh. It recalls to mind - unpleasantly so - that very first time, when he stood bare before Steven’s cold gaze.

This time, Steven’s gaze is not cold. It is tired and deep with grief, but also hungry. He looks Cuthbert over, tip to toes, and puts hands to him in a way he has not yet. He touches every bit of skin he can, stroking with his palms and fingers, not squeezing or grabbing or pinching but simply touching.

It feels good. Cuthbert does not want it to, but it does. Gooseflesh goes rippling across his skin in the wake of Steven’s fingers; his nipples stiffen, and when Steven plucks gently at them his breath catches; heat begins to grow in the pit of his belly, creeping down to pulse between his legs. 

He is led to the bed. He climbs in and lays back, watching Steven briskly undress himself. Then the man climbs atop him and leans down to kiss him.

The only other person Cuthbert has kissed in his life is Alain. Steven, obviously, is more practiced at it. Patiently, he coaxes Cuthbert’s lips apart and tongues at his open mouth, warm hands cupping his face. 

Up until now, Cuthbert has privately thought that it must be no wonder Steven’s wife sought the pleasure of another man’s bed, if he carried on with her the same way. He has never been rough, exactly, but neither has he been gentle, and neither has he ever sought to pleasure Cuthbert beyond what minimum has been necessary for Cuthbert’s body to accept him - he has been brisk and efficient and cold and focused solely on his own enjoyment. It comes to Cuthbert now, while Steven kisses him and touches his face and uses his other hand to fondle and tease at his body until it cannot help but respond, that he has been treated as more of a whore than he realized.

“You look so like her,” Steven murmurs, distracting him from his thoughts.

“Like who?” he asks stupidly, for he knows exactly who Steven is thinking of. “The lady Gabrielle, do you mean?”

“Yes,” Steven sighs. He kisses Cuthbert once more, then mouths along the line of his jaw. “You and Robert both. You both have her look. You take so after Robert, as I am sure you have been told - ah, he was so beautiful when we were boys together, say true. And Gabrielle…” He sighs again, warm breath gusting over Cuthbert’s ear and making him shiver. “I knew I’d never marry for love, but I still thought myself so lucky on our wedding day when I saw her, so radiant… She betrayed me, it’s true, and perhaps I have hated her for that, but I do love her still.”

Cuthbert does not know what to say to this. He does not say anything. Silence does not come easily to him, but it is something he is learning well under Steven’s tutelage. Perhaps this is why he was chosen for this. It’s a question he has found himself unable to stop considering, like scratching at a healing scab. Alain is near as close to Roland, Jamie every bit as fair as he is, and it is common enough knowledge that Colton Whitman keeps poor care of his son Thomas, an orbiter around their little ka-tet, and would not notice anything amiss, nor care even if he did. And so - although he would not wish it on anyone else - why was it Cuthbert chosen, out of all of them? Why one of them to begin with, and not some gilly who knows a lifetime’s worth of bed-tricks?

Steven does not seem to expect any response from him. His hungry mouth moves down Cuthbert’s neck, sucking and nipping at the tender flesh there, and then down onto his chest. He draws one of Cuthbert’s nipples into his mouth, closing his teeth around it just short of painfully. At the same time, his hand slides down across Cuthbert’s flat belly and between his legs, and Steven begins to stroke him there.

He is used to the quick press of Steven’s fingers inside him to open him up, or even a quick rub to spread his juices around. This is different. Steven’s fingers explore him with sensual care, pressing between his lips to tease at his entrance and then sliding away, circling that taut nub at the top of his sex until it’s begging to be properly touched.

Cuthbert drops his head back and closes his eyes. Though he’s become better at letting this happen, the pleasure of Steven’s touch now makes it difficult once more to let go his awareness of his own body. He seeks refuge now in the wandering of his drunken thoughts. For a time all he can dwell on is how good it feels, but he has never been able to keep one thought in his mind for long even when sober, and soon enough he starts to drift. 

From the current situation his mind goes to Gabrielle - he had not known her well, though there had been the occasional family dinner where she brought Roland and joined the Allgoods in their apartments, and others where Robert and Lavinia brought Cuthbert over to the Deschain quarters. Steven must have loved her just as true as he said, in his own cold and distant way, to be so moved by her death even when his own son and half the court besides knew she and Marten were giving him horns.

And then he thinks of Roland - poor Roland, half an orphan now, never to reconcile his difficult relationship with the woman he hated and loved so in equal measure. He’d brought her up when he’d confronted Cuthbert about what that hateful ball showed him, hadn’t he? It must have struck him to the very bone, to see his mother’s unfaithfulness echoed in his own best friend.

A part of him pities Steven, but a larger part of him understands. Though his body has grown accustomed enough that he gets wet during their trysts, Steven Deschain does not truly arouse him. The man is too skinny, too scarred, his body and hands too rough - he is too  _ old _ , and he makes Cuthbert think inescapably of his own father, for they are close indeed. No, when Steven is atop him and Cuthbert cannot turn his thoughts away, he thinks of others. Alain, mostly, and those times in Mejis, and how soft and tender Alain’s hands had been slipping up his sides to touch his tender breasts.

Tonight, though, he finds his thoughts returning to Roland. He wonders, as Steven pushes his long and skinny cock inside of him, if Roland’s is that way as well, if that is a way in which boys take after their fathers. It is shorter, perhaps, he imagines, for at times he is still bruised deep inside after Steven has finished with him, though never as badly as the first time. And Roland’s body is broader and heavier and not so hairy, not so scarred, and darker of complexion, for he takes after Gabrielle in that way - but the face is the very same, it is, and when Cuthbert opens his eyes he sees that face swimming above him in the dimness and fancies that perhaps this is Roland thirty years from now, that Roland has forgiven him, that Roland wants him, that he serves with his guns and his mind and his life and his very body itself, whatever Roland wishes of him -

He closes his eyes once more and puts his arms around the man, palms sliding down his back, feeling the way his muscles flex as he thrusts. He rocks up into it, struggling to match the motion of his own hips to the man atop him - it is harder then he would have thought, and soon enough the muscles of his abdomen - unused to such exercise - begin to grow sore, but it is a good sort of ache. 

He thinks of Roland’s big hands touching him, Roland’s faded blue eyes looking into his - he thinks of Roland moaning his name in the moment of his climax, of knowing that he brought Roland pleasure rather than pain - his own pleasure begins to rise towards a crest, a feeling he knows from his own explorations with himself but has never felt before during intercourse. In his enjoyment he wraps a leg around the narrow hips of the man thrusting into him, marveling at the way it changes the angle and therefore the feeling of being fucked.

“Oh,” he sighs out, because it’s so good, because he is good, because he is wanted and forgiven, “oh, oh  _ Roland _ -”

The man stops. Cuthbert’s eyes fly open. He realizes his mistake at once. “Steven -” he starts to say, but before he can get any further, Steven Deschain briskly backhands him twice, the second time hard enough to split his bottom lip, and resumes fucking him.

When Steven finishes, he climbs off Cuthbert, and instead of rolling into bed beside him, gets up. Cuthbert sits up, resisting the urge to draw the sheets to his chest. 

“Steven,” he says again, softly, wary of the palpable tightness of the man. “I am sorry. I - I had more to drink at the feast than I ought to have, say true, and my mind wandered.”

There is no response. Steven dresses himself with quick, jerky movements, then begins to pace the length of the room beyond the foot of the bed. Once, twice, and then still without speaking he comes up beside the bed. Though he sorely wishes to, Cuthbert does not let himself shrink away.

Steven grabs him by the hair and yanks him from the bed with such savage force that a clump of it comes out in his fingers. Cuthbert is tumbled naked onto the stone floor, where he does not even have time to try to get to his knees before a booted foot is driven into his stomach, winding him and knocking him onto his back. Another kick, this time to his ribs, and another, and he manages to curl up on his side around his own soft belly, still struggling to draw a breath. 

As soon as he can speak he tries to apologize once more, but each time he tries the words are knocked from him by a blow. Soon enough he stops trying and simply curls as tight up as he can around himself, hands over his head, and waits for Steven’s fury to wear itself out. The only sounds in the chamber are Steven’s ragged, heavy breathing and the sharp and helpless sounds of pain that are forced from Cuthbert with each kick. One such blow sparks such immense red agony in his hand he is sure his fingers must be broken. Another catches him low in the belly, the square tip of Steven’s boot digging so hard into him he half expects it to come out his back, and that pain rises up like hot lead through him, so that he hardly even notices the sudden hot gush as his bladder lets go. 

Steven circles around him and kicks him sharply in the kidneys, again and again, until Cuthbert finally risks inciting further ire to scramble away, because he is afraid they will rupture inside of him. Steven sends him on his way with a boot to his bare ass, so that he goes sprawling onto his face. There he lays, clutching onto the carpet, shuddering all over and struggling to breathe, waiting for a foot to come stamping down on his back or his head.

Instead, he hears footsteps come around beside him, and then the sound of the bed creaking. There is a sigh. After that, a long silence. Eventually he dares to lift his head, and through his unaccountably blurry eyes he sees Steven sitting on the edge of the bed, face in his hands, looking small and stooped.

Slowly, gingerly, Cuthbert rolls over and sits up. Every part of his body is screaming. It is still deeply painful to breathe, so much so he thinks at least one of his ribs must be sprung. He is slowly beginning to realize he wet himself, but he is already so frightened and in so much pain that there is not much room left for the humiliation. At least he is beginning to think he might leave this room alive, if he can keep his damn fool mouth shut.

At length, Steven raises his head and scrubs his hands down his face, then folds them in his lap. “Have you fucked my son?” he asks, still not looking at Cuthbert.

“Have I -”

“Have you fucked my son? It is a simple question. Have you fucked him, or sucked him, or given him a tug, or let him rut into that cleft between your thighs?”

“I - no, Ste - sai Deschain.” Briefly, Cuthbert considers saying that he does not think Roland would piss on him to put him out, should he come upon him aflame, but decides against it. For all he knows, hearing that Roland knows might put Steven even further out of temper.

Steven nods, his eyes still focused on some distant place. “What about any others? Christopher’s son, perhaps?”

“No, sai Deschain. I’ve not lain with anyone else.” 

Another nod. Now, finally, Steven looks at him. There is no trace of pity or warmth or any emotion at all in his eyes. “Good. You will not, henceforth. You are mine, and you belong to me, and none other will have the use of your body until such time as I put you aside. What thoughts you entertain yourself with when you seek the pleasure of your own hand is of no concern to me, but when you are in my bed, you will not think or speak of anyone else. Do you understand?”

Cuthbert meets that cold and empty gaze. The man is deadly serious, he sees, and so he nods his head and lowers his eyes and says, softly, “Yes, sai Deschain.”

There is another creak from the bed. Steven’s footsteps approach him, and then Steven’s hand curls around his bicep and drags him to his feet. “Then go. You’ve soiled my carpet. Do not dawdle in these chambers, for I have to look upon you any longer, I know not what I might do.” He marches Cuthbert out into his sitting room and then - naked still, bloody and sticky with spend and smelling of sex and his own piss - out into the hallway. He lets go, and leaves, and a moment later tosses a bundle of clothing out.

Cuthbert’s pants are there, but not his drawers. His slinkum shirt is, but not his proper fitted shirt, nor his jacket, nor his boots or socks. He dresses in the hallway as quickly as he can, terrified the entire time that Roland might leave his room and see him. Luck is with him, and this does not happen.

Luck is only with him so far, though. He makes it through the castle, out onto the grounds, and into the novice barracks without encountering anyone. There, though, is a familiar stout shape standing beside his door.

He slows his steps, and then stops short, hoping that the darkness of nighttime will disguise his sorry state. “Good evening, Alain.” His voice is rough, but it cannot be helped. Perhaps he can chalk it up to grief or drink. “I do not wish to chat tonight. I am very tired.”

“You do not wish to chat at all of late,” Alain observes, without heat. “I do not think we have spoken three words since we went to take that ball from Roland.”

“I suppose I have not had much to say.” 

There is a short silence, very skeptical. Alain knows him well enough to know how patently untrue such an assertion is. “I would that things could be between us as they once were. ‘Twas not I who spoke you harsh.”

Cuthbert throws a longing glance at the door. Beyond it is his private little room and his private little bed. Inside he can remove his clothes and wipe himself down with clean water and rest his aching body, but between him and that small sanctuary is Alain, apparently hellbent on making amends now, of all times. “Alain,” he begins, plaintively.

“I meant to be patient,” Alain says quietly. “I meant to let you come to me when you felt ready to, when you saw I did not mean to throw you over. I’m only here now because - well - something is wrong.” There is a note of anxiety in his voice, now. To anyone else he would likely sound as steady as he ever does, but to Cuthbert, who knows him so well, he is plainly worried. “I had a dream about you.”

“‘Tis very flattering,” Cuthbert says. He is, he decides, tired of this conversation. He has no more politeness left in him. He steps briskly forward and shoves past Alain, pushing his door open. “Tell me of your dreams another night, or, perhaps, simply seek your bed and have another.”

Despite his stoutness, Alain is very quick. He grabs Cuthbert by the wrist, and though he does not squeeze or hurt, his grip is like iron. “I dreamed you were hurt. My premonitions are not often clear, but this one was. I dreamed that you were hurt and alone.”

“Why,” Cuthbert says, his heart in his throat from being grabbed in such a manner so reminiscent of Steven’s prior rough handling, “I am surely not, for I have my fellow novices all around me, and my family besides, and the whole of the court of Gilead. And I am clearly perfectly well, besides, so you may leave at any time.”

“I don’t think you are,” says Alain.

“Let  _ go _ of me,” Cuthbert hisses, trying to yank his arm away. He has no energy for wordplay. He only wants to clean himself up and sleep. Blessedly, Alain lets go, and Cuthbert darts into his room. Unfortunately, Alain is quick enough to get his boot in the door, and strong enough to shove his way in.

He does not put his hands on Cuthbert again. He edges carefully past him and kindles the oil lamp on the table beside the bed, then turns to look at Cuthbert in its guttering orange light.

“Is this how he treats you?”

There is no use pretending he does not know what Alain means. Alain was there, after all, when Roland said what he said, and even had he not been, he Knows things. Cuthbert is far too weary and hurt in both his body and heart to keep his mind sealed up. Indeed, he welcomes the familiar brush of Alain’s touch, for it has been too long a time since he felt the touch of his ka-mate’s mind.

“No,” he says, and sits down on the trunk at the end of his bed. He does not want to stay standing, but neither does he wish to soil his sheets. “Not usually, no. I spoke out of turn and made him angry tonight. It is a singular talent of mine, as you well know.”

Alain regards him with silent sympathy. “Let me help you see to yourself.”

It is humiliating, but Cuthbert does not think he has it in him to feel any more humiliated than he already does. He is mostly just grateful to have help, for he has stiffened rapidly and is afraid to try and bend and twist enough to clean and wrap himself everywhere he needs cleaning and wrapping.

He strips off his soiled clothes and submits to Alain wiping him clean, though he does insist on cleaning the ugly mess between his thighs up himself. The rest of himself, especially his back and sides, he lets Alain take care of. He lets Alain probe at and then wrap his ribs, as well, and his hand - two of the fingers are indeed visibly crooked and must be pulled back into place and then splinted. His eyes well up and drip down his face at that, which Alain kindly does not comment on. Cuthbert is well versed in enduring pain, but he is so very tired, and so worried too of what might happen if his fingers do not heal well.

Finally, Alain presents him with a clean pair of drawers and a slinkum to pull on, so that he can cover himself. This he does gratefully, and finally lets himself seek the comfort of his bed.

Alain sits down on it beside him, and after a moment of hesitation, draws him into a sidelong embrace. “I need not know what is between you two,” he says, very softly. “You may tell me if you wish, but it does not change the love I hold for you as my dear friend and ka-mate. It struck Roland in a very raw place, as I am sure you know, but I do not think he hates you, either.”

“Say you so.” Cuthbert says. He doesn’t agree, and he knows Alain can feel it. A sense of warm and wordless comfort washes over him, courtesy of Alain’s touch - the feeling of sinking into a warm bath at the end of a long day, or of lying on soft grass beneath a hot summer sun, or of being very small and held in his mother’s arms - and he draws in one single, shaking breath, then says, all quick before he can take it back, “Stay with me?”

The bed is so narrow that Alain must lay flat on his back and Cuthbert on his side, wedged between Alain and the wall and mostly on top of him, but stay with him Alain does. And though it is uncomfortable to lay so, and sure to hurt him worse on the morrow, Cuthbert finds he does not mind at all. The solid warmth of Alain’s body is very reassuring, as is the steady humming presence of his touch in Cuthbert’s mind. It draws out some of the desperate loneliness which has settled into him these past few months, which he did not even realize hurt so much until it was eased.

A part of him hates himself for it - for using Alain so, when he cannot offer anything back - but the greater part of him simply grasps onto that sense of safety. He falls asleep still chasing his own thoughts in circles, wondering if he should be doing this or if it would be right to send Alain away, and for the first time since he came back from Mejis his dreams are easy.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cuthbert finds a loophole and has a relatively nice time, ft the extremely rare het sex scene.

The next morning, Cuthbert awakens cuddled up against a man’s warm body, and before anything else, he feels the now-familiar sense of leaden shame drop into the pit of his belly. Sometimes he falls asleep in Steven’s arms and sometimes he curls on his side at the edge of the bed, but he always wakes up having wrapped himself around the man in the night, betrayed by his body’s unconscious yearning for comfort. 

This morning, though, he realizes moments afterwards that it is not Steven in bed with him at all. He does not open his eyes to Steven’s grand and stately bedchamber, but to his own narrow cell in the novice barracks. It is Alain - shorter, broader, softer - who shares his bed. And he is not simply wounded in heart but in body, as well.

Slowly, with much crackling of joints, he sits up. It is impossible to move without jostling Alain, and so he does not try, and is not surprised when Alain opens his eyes and looks at him. He tries to keep quiet his groaning, but every hurt part of him has stiffened up dreadfully during the night, and the awkward position he had to occupy wedged between Alain and the wall has not helped matters at all.

Still, he sits up and then climbs over Alain to stand on his own two feet. Gingerly, he stretches as much as he can, testing the current limits of his injuries. Thus limbered, he takes a single step and opens up the shutters on the outside wall of the cell to let in the morning air and light. It is not much, but better than the closed-in stink of sweat and blood that permeates the room at present.

“I have to piss,” he says as warning, so Alain may look away if he wishes. Cuthbert steadily does not look in his direction, not when he goes beneath the bed for the chamberpot nor when he skims his drawers down and squats over it, nor especially when he cannot help but gasp as his water begins to flow and the hot and squeezing pain of it traces a fiery path up into his guts. He doesn’t wish to look into the pot, not at all. When he wipes himself dry, though, the cloth comes away red, and he peeks between his own legs to see that, indeed, what has come out of him seems to mostly be blood.

His whole torso is a patchwork of pains, but there is an especial sort of hot and heavy feeling low in his back, where his kidneys are. He remembers the blunt toe of Steven’s boot striking him there over and over again and wonders uneasily whether or not something has been ruptured inside of him. Surely, he tries to tell himself, if it had been, he would be dead already. His innards may be bruised, perhaps, even badly, but were he ruptured and hemorrhaging, he would surely know -

“Do you think you ought to see the doctor?” Alain asks softly. Cuthbert whips his head around, but Alain is not watching him - he is staring instead, very politely, at the wall. “You are fretting loudly. I cannot help but hear it.”

“I don’t know that there’s much he could do,” Cuthbert says, standing back up. “Nor do I wish to have that man prodding around at my nethers, if I am being honest with you, which I suppose I cannot help but be.”

Alain glances towards him, an unhappy wrinkle between his brows. It is not fair to all but accuse him of eavesdropping, when Cuthbert knows good and well that he cannot much help what he picks up and that it troubles him greatly that he cannot choose to believe a comforting lie in favor of a painful truth. All the same, Cuthbert does not much care for whether or not it is fair. His soul is raw and he wishes, for just a moment, not to feel so terribly exposed.

“If you say so,” is all Alain says. “Do you wish me to go?”

Cuthbert scrubs his hands down his face. What he wishes, he doesn’t know. He wants to be alone as badly as he wants the comfort of Alain’s company. He wants none of this to have ever happened, and for his life to be as uncomplicated as it was three months ago.

“I wish,” he says finally, “to be drunk.”

“Very well,” Alain says. “That I can help with, at least.” Without saying anything further, he gets up from the bed and takes his leave. 

Somehow, the room feels smaller without him in it. Cuthbert takes advantage of his absence to find and pull on a pair of trousers, then, having more or less exhausted his will to move around, lays down in bed and waits.

By the time Alain comes back, he has almost drowsed off. The creak of approaching footsteps wakes him, though, so that he has time enough to arrange himself in a position that could almost be mistaken for artful lounging.

Slung over one arm, Alain has a hefty-looking basket. He nudges the door shut behind himself with his heel and sets it down on the chest at the end of the bed, then flips open the top. Nestled inside are three bottles of wine, somewhat dusty but in otherwise good condition.

“Alain Johns,” Cuthbert declares fervently, “you are the greatest man I have ever known.”

\---

The whole room has taken on a most unsteady character, spinning and shifting about no matter how firmly Cuthbert tries to fix it in his gaze. If he had to guess, clever fellow that he is, he would put the cause of this sudden upheaval as the bottle of wine which he drank down over the course of the afternoon. Always fair, Alain had allotted one to Cuthbert and one to himself, and kept the third for them to split. 

Cuthbert leans back against Alain’s chest, for Alain is the only thing in the room that seems steady and fixed. That he is also warm and pleasantly soft, with the firmness of a gunslinger’s well-trained muscles beneath, is, Cuthbert loftily assures himself, a secondary concern. 

“I don’t desire him, you know,” Cuthbert says. He is drunk enough that his voice comes out drowsy and slurred. “He doesn’t excite me. I suppose he’s handsome enough in his own way - Roland’s got his face and it looks fine enough on him - but I simply do not feel any spark of lust for the man. I have to think of other men to get myself aroused enough that it doesn’t hurt.” He lets his head loll back against Alain’s shoulder and gazes up into his face. 

Alain’s cheeks have taken on a distinctly pinkish appearance, and he is not quite meeting Cuthbert’s gaze. Grinning, Cuthbert reaches up to tweak his nose.

“It’s so sweet how shy you are about these things,” he says. Closing his eyes, he gathers up the train of his thoughts, for he had been saying something important, he’s sure of it - ah. Yes. “I think of you a lot.”

“Bert -”

“I think of you - I think of that time in Mejis, when we kissed and you put your hands up my shirt - it’s a very sweet memory, and easy enough to close my eyes and cast my mind back to that while Steven does as he wishes atop me - but it isn’t just you. ‘Twas Roland I thought of last night, and I’d had a bit to drink, and the old man was a bit sweeter with me than usually he is, and, well…” He shrugs, jerkily, and hisses when the motion jars his sprung ribs. “You know how my mouth has a way of speaking without the permission of my mind. I called out his son’s name while he was inside of me, and evidently this did not well please him.”

Alain does not say anything, but his arm comes up to wrap around Cuthbert’s shoulders.

“He told me I’m not to lay with any other man until he tires of me.” Why he is still speaking of this, Cuthbert is not even sure. Last night he had been determined not to. Now, though - he still aches in his body and his heart, but he is also comfortably drunk and comfortably held against Alain’s reassuringly solid bulk, and there is so much he has not spoken of, so much poison that wants to come out. “He said I am not to even think of another man when I am with him. I suppose that I owe him my body, for he is dinh and I am his to dispose of as he sees fit, but I cannot imagine that I owe him such loyalty in my thoughts as well, nor see how he would even enforce such a thing.”

“He cannot,” Alain says, after a moment. His voice is low and heavy. “I do not think it honorable of him to even ask. But I suppose there’s nothing to be done about it.”

“Have a care,” Cuthbert says wryly. “You speak of he who would be king, had we such any longer.”

“Kings can be wrong.”

“Oho!” Cuthbert wheezed out an abbreviated laugh, mindful of his ribs. “Why, I never took you for such a revolutionary, Al! Will you be joining the Good Man’s cause next, and championing the will of the downtrodden people?”

“Of course not.” There is a note of genuine shock in Alain’s tone. “I am staunch for the Affiliation. I’ve bled in service of it, have I not? It is not radical to say that a king can do wrong. Arthur Eld was a famously good king, but for him to be good, others had to be bad, no? Why, even today, there’s -” He doesn’t say the name, for in his own way he’s a superstitious sort, but forks the sign of the evil eye east, towards Discordia and the great scuttling crimson thing that rules over that dread land.

“I cannot argue your logic.” Bemused, Cuthbert cranes his head to glance up at Alain’s face. Set and serious it is, giving a glimpse of the rock-solid will and steady mind behind it, which are not often seen by those who do not know him well. “You seem to feel quite strongly about it, at that.”

“I do.” The arm around his shoulders tightens a bit, Alain’s blunt fingers gripping at him. “He dishonors you and he dishonors himself, in doing this. He has the right to request it, but it is not seemly that he should exercise that right, and especially not of you. I know it pains you to speak of Roland’s reaction, but that I lay at his father’s door as well, for he should have known how it would take his son to discover such a thing, and he cannot have imagined it would forever go undiscovered. But I suppose he prizes his own pleasure more than any matter of decency.”

This, from Alain, is quite a speech. A fiery one, at that. Cuthbert tucks his face - unaccountably hot, now, which perhaps he can blame on the wine - back into Alain’s neck so as not to have to face his steely eyes. By all rights, he should be happy to hear it, for it is not as if he himself much cares for the service he’s been forced into. To hear it all laid out so plain, though -

“I suppose so,” he mumbles. “But there’s naught to be done except to bear it, is there?”

“No,” Alain sighs after a moment. “I suppose not.”

“I do wish it had been you,” Cuthbert says softly. Barely more than mouths the words, he does, for he knows he ought not say them. Not now, not here, not to this man. He is far too sore in his body to feel amorous, but the sheer comfort of Alain’s warm bulk is dangerous in and of itself. He could get used to being held so. “I wish you had had me first, back in Mejis.”

“Bert,” Alain says, but no more after that. Perhaps he does not know what to say. Perhaps he is waiting for something - an invitation?

Reluctantly, Cuthbert levers himself up and away from Alain, so that they only sit side by side on the narrow bunk. It hurts to move himself so, and he immediately misses the anchoring warmth of Alain’s body. “Mind me not. I’m piss drunk and my fool tongue has run away with itself. I ought to put myself to bed, and that’s just what I’m going to do. See you that you find your own chamber and don’t trip over your feet on the way there.”

\---

Over the past few weeks, Cuthbert has embarked on a slow and methodical circuit of the low town’s various drinking establishments. Most of them he hasn’t come back to a second time, but this one is one of his favorites; tonight is his third visit.

It occupies a comfortable position between the shiny, well-turned establishments which cater to Gilead’s higher class of citizens and the dirty watering holes where working men cram themselves in shoulder-to-shoulder to drown their weariness in beer before they go home to sleep and rise and spend another day toiling. The furniture is solid and well-used but not shabby, the common room cozy but not cramped, and the air redolent of smoke, cooking meat, beer, and the smell of many people all close together in one warm room, but not with the sort of ground-in stink places got when the sawdust on the floor was changed once a fortnight.

The girls are pretty, as well.

He hadn’t realized that the place was a brothel when he’d first come in, and been naive enough to mistake the first whore who approached him for a flirtatious woman. The second, though, had made him realize what was going on. There are six of them who work the place and by now he knows their faces, and they’re coming to know his as well. Obviously he’s a good mark - finely tailored clothes, neatly kept, clean and well-fed and with the sort of straight and strong body that came of a good upbringing, and, he flatters himself to believe, handsome as well, clearly a man with money. That he has so far chosen not to partake of their charms seems to have sparked a bit of a competition.

Tonight he has taken a seat against the wall, where he can watch the goings-on but still stay somewhat apart. The bright and crowded cheer of the tavern helps pull him out of his own melancholy thoughts, and he has always enjoyed people-watching. He drinks at a steady but unhurried pace, having found through much experimentation just how to be optimally drunk for an easy night’s sleep when he goes back to his barracks cell, and leans back against his chair, and lets the noise of the room flow over him.

When the girl approaches, he notices her at once, though he doesn’t stir from his relaxed posture. She props her elbows on his table and leans in, flashing a flirtatious smile above the generous glimpse of her bosom this position gives him.

“Good evening and well met t’you, sir,” she says.

“Well met indeed,” he says back, returning her smile with his own smaller, crooked one. “I don’t know that I recognize your face, and surely such a lovely thing as you would leave an impression. Are you new, then?”

She laughs, a sweet sound like the chuckle of a brook running over stones. “I am at that. You must be in often, then, to know the staff so well.”

“Oh, I’ve spent an evening in this fine establishment a time or two before, ‘tis true. I’ve a knack for remembering faces, too.” He glances around the room and spots two of the usual women standing together near the bar, looking towards them and then whispering to each other. “Were you put up to approaching me?”

Now she goes very fetchingly pink, which makes the freckles dotting her face and neck and what he can see of her chest stand out even more. “You’ve guessed true. Am I imposing?” Though she’s still blushing, the look she gives him is quite frank, as are her words. “For if I’ve simply been sent to bark after a man who wishes not to be bothered, I’ll go and waste no more of my time or yours. I thought perhaps -”

She cuts herself off, but he can guess. “That perhaps you were being sent a good bit of business for your first evening, eh?”

“Something along those lines. Although it’s surely not my  _ first _ night, by any means.”

He looks her over again, this time more thoroughly. Young, definitely, although he puts her age at a few years older than him. Plump and lovely and buxom, with a sweet freckled face and a lovely fall of dark hair. That serves, perhaps, to make her look younger than she is, and more innocent, for now when he looks into her dark eyes he sees that she is indeed an experienced woman.

“Well,” he says, coming to an abrupt decision that even he is not entirely aware he’s come to until he hears the words issuing from his own mouth, “I am glad to hear it, for one of us ought to know what they’re doing, don’t you think? Have a seat, if it pleases you, and let us speak of arrangements.”

She wastes no time in pulling out the chair and sitting down near him, leaning forward still to give him that intriguing glimpse down her bodice. Momentarily, though, he is more interested in the brief but genuine expressions of shock on the faces of the two women who had sent her over here, no doubt expecting her to be rebuffed. “Do you mean to say that such a handsome man as you has never had a woman before, then?”

“Alas, I must confess, ‘tis true.” He puts his hand over his heart and fixes a hangdog look upon her. “I suppose I’ve simply never had both opportunity and inclination align for me until now.”

“And what, might I ask,” says she, “has changed now? For if you’ve been here before you’ve surely been offered before.”

In truth, he is not sure. Perhaps it is simply that it amuses him to buck the other women’s expectations of him. They are perfectly comely as well, and he cannot say he’s been unmoved by any carnal urges stemming from their offers. He does not tell her this, but simply smiles and performs the most sweeping seated bow he can muster, and says, “Why, never before have I been offered the chance to pluck such a lovely rose as you, of course.”

“I should imagine you could pluck any rose you wish, with that flatterer’s tongue in your mouth.” She reaches out to touch his face, her fingers light and warm against his jaw, and leans in for a kiss. 

Her mouth is very sweet and soft, and she is quite skilled. Although the only person in his life he’s ever kissed has been Alain, who was only somewhat less clueless, she draws him on into it so that he feels the give and take to be quite natural, rather than being overly aware of being taught. As they kiss, she shifts to sit across his lap and wrap her arms around his shoulders. The warm and welcome weight of her sends a thrill of lust shivering up into his belly from between his legs.

All of a sudden, he desires her desperately. He puts his hands on her waist and pulls her in close against himself, reveling in the softness of her body. Quite primly, all things considered, she’s sat herself side-saddle across his lap; he runs one hand down the swell of her hip and her leg to her knee, where he pulls up a great handful of her dress so he can slide his hand up under it, his own slim and calloused fingers stroking at the hot, soft flesh of her thigh. Up, all the way up, until instead of the softer and downy hair of her body his fingers find a nest of coarser curls, and he realizes - with another, deeper pang of lust - that she’s wearing nothing in the way of undergarments.

“For a man who’s never been with a woman, you seem to know just what you want,” she murmurs in a wash of hot breath against his mouth.

“I’ve ample experience in wanting. It’s the acting that I haven’t yet done.” He moves away from her mouth to kiss her soft and scented neck, following the line of her pulse with his lips. Removing one hand from his shoulder, she reaches between the two of them and skillfully loosens the laces of her bodice, so that her breasts spill free. Cuthbert does not waste one moment ignoring this brazen invitation, but buries his face in them directly, reaching up to cup one with the hand not currently occupying itself between her legs. They are soft and heavy and, he is delighted to see, all over freckles. He kisses down the slope of one and teases at her soft pink nipple with his lips until it is hard enough to suck upon.

The territory between her legs is at once familiar and deeply alien. The general conformation is not much different from what he is used to, but her body is not his own, and with just his sensitive fingertips alone he can tell that there are differences. Along with what he can feel, the sheer fact that it’s another person he’s touching makes it feel new. He strokes his fingertips through the hair over her plump outer lips, then slides a single finger in between them. Without being able to look, it’s hard to work out where among the folds of slick flesh the nub of her clitoris lies. He settles for rubbing slowly up and down the length of her slit, smearing her juices about to make everything pleasantly slippery.

Cuthbert is self-aware enough to admit to a certain exhibitionistic streak within himself. All his life, he’s enjoyed having attention and being seen to do well, and right now the knowledge that he’s fondling this sweet woman in a public room is deeply exciting. Nonetheless, he does wish for the time and privacy to go about actually learning something, and so with some regret he lifts his face from her breasts and pulls his hand out from under her dress.

“Let us go upstairs, though, shall we? For no doubt you’ve much to teach me, and I hope you will find me an apt pupil indeed.”

She kisses his mouth again - he had not thought whores did that, for he recalls that Roland said the one he visited did not, but he cannot complain, for he enjoys it quite a lot - and slides off his lap, not bothering to lace her dress back up. “I hope so as well,” she says, reaching out a hand to him. 

He takes it, and she leads him upstairs. Being so led means he cannot watch the way her unbound breasts bounce and jiggle on the stairs, but it is a small sacrifice, for he can have as much an eyeful as he wants of her when they are closed alone into her crib.

It is a narrow room, though not poorly appointed. Her bed looks both inviting and comfortable. She leads him to it and then, gently and with a wicked smile, pushes him to sit upon it. Once he’s sitting, she stands in front of him and pulls her arms from the sleeves of her dress, letting it fall down to the ground so that she is all the way bare.

The freckles are all over, he is delighted to see. They cover her soft belly and plump thighs. It comes to him to wonder if there are any on her sex, beneath the hair perhaps.

“Tell me, young lord,” she says softly, “in all your vast experience of wanting, is there anything you especially wish to have?”

“Oh, just about everything. I’m a bit of a greedy fellow, I am.” He puts his hands on her hips and strokes her slowly, down over her buttocks - just as soft and lovely and plump as the rest of her - and her thighs, then back up, past her sex and up her belly to cup her breasts again, marveling at the immensely satisfying weight of them in his hands, at how exciting it is to feel her stiff nipples against his palms. “I suppose I’d like to know what pleases you.”

“To please you pleases me,” she purrs. She sits back in his lap, this time straddling him with her knees spread around his hips, her hands on his shoulders and her freckled breasts right in his face. 

“Well,” he says, running his hands down her smooth back, “to please  _ you _ is what pleases me, and so in order to please me you must show me how you wish to be pleasured. I can,” he adds with a wicked grin, “go all night like this, if you wish.”

“Now there’s a boast I hear often enough. If it’s a show you want, though, then I suppose I can’t refuse.” She puts her hands to his shoulders and pushes him down onto his back, leaning over him. A sudden jolt of fear goes through him - it is too reminiscent of the way that Steven pinned him down that very first time - but he pushes that thought from his mind. It is not at all the same. It’s no man atop him, but simply a whore who he could easily overpower if he needed to.

After a moment she sits back up and the pressure on him disappears. The unsettled feeling lingers, as much as he tries to distract himself with the sight of her body. She is so soft and lushly round, shuffling on her knees up his body until she comes to a stop straddling his chest. She is welcoming and open and harmless, and he’s not going to let the specter of a man who hasn’t so much as looked his way in weeks to ruin this.

Kneeling over him, she reaches down with one hand to spread her lips apart and reveal the hidden folds of her sex within. With the other she touches herself. First she sensually runs a hand down the length of her own body, pausing to cup and squeeze her breast and tweak her own hard nipple, then moving on to stroke her gently curving belly and then her hip and down her thigh. She uses her nails on her own skin, gently, so that gooseflesh rises up in the wake of her touch.

Finally, she touches herself. Spread open thus, he can easily see where her clit lies; she circles it with her fingertip and then touches it very lightly with her fingertip. Gently, she taps at it, and from his angle he can see her slick hole clench every time she does. 

“Why,” he says, marveling, “it’s so small! What a darling little thing.” 

He is not looking at her face, not at all, but he hears the skepticism in her voice when she asks, “And how many of them have you seen before that you expect it to be sized differently, then?”

“Only the one, I suppose,” he admits. To his eye, hers does look quite small, tucked all neatly up between her lips so that it can only be seen when she spreads herself open so. With a bit of bending he can see his own in its usual state, and when he’s aroused enough all he has to do is look down to see it poking out from its nest of dark curls, but then she’s plumper than he is as well, with more belly in the way, as well as a more pronounced pubic mound.

“And whose might that be, then? For I do recall as you said you’ve no experience. Unless that was simply a lie to get me into bed?” As she speaks, all teasing amusement, she continues to toy with herself, stroking and rubbing, teasing at her entrance and making a show of how wet she already is.

“Oh,” Cuthbert says brightly, “I have been known to simply say things. My mouth has a terrible habit of running off without permission. I spoke you true enough, though, when I said I’ve never lain with a woman.” It is hard to think of what to say when being treated to such a show. He cannot recall a time in his life when he’s ever been so desperately aroused; the only one that comes close is when he and Alain had been fumbling at each other in Hambry, and even then, it doesn’t compare to this. He aches to touch her. He aches to be touched, quite literally. 

With a speed and skill no doubt borne of long practice, she brings herself to climax. That she’s more used to pretending in order to stoke the egos of her customers he has no doubt, but this one is real enough; he watches the way her cunt spasms, spilling out a runnel of creamy slick that drips from her lips to fall on his chest, and bitterly regrets that he’s still wearing his shirt and can’t feel it on his skin. Without even thinking, he reaches out and swipes the blot of fluid up from off his shirt and pops his finger directly into his mouth, to savor the rich and musky taste of her.

At the sight of her orgasm, his own cunt clenches so tightly and suddenly that for a moment he thinks just watching her has pushed him over the edge. There is no sense of satisfaction, though, only a deepening of his desire, and a growing awareness that while he wants -  _ needs  _ \- to have her, he doesn’t know how it is he wishes to do that.

“And do you find yourself educated enough now?” she asks him, breathing heavily. “Ready to show me what you’ve learned, perhaps?” She shifts back to sit on his pelvis, wiggling her bottom against him in a way that makes him twitch and jerk his hips up against her without any conscious thought, and starts to deftly unbutton his shirt. “Let’s see what the young lord’s got hidden under these fine clothes, shall we?”

It ought to thrill him to be undressed by such a lovely woman, even if she is being paid to pretend she desires him. All it does it make his guts twist unpleasantly, though, and so he grabs her wrists and then - aware that she is looking at him oddly, that in a moment she might see his inexplicable fear - sits up as best he can and smoothly flips the both of them over, so she’s laying flat back on the bed and he’s kneeling above her. Once she realizes the way he’s trying to move her she goes willingly enough, and she is for sure a pretty sight laid out beneath him so, naked and flushed still with arousal.

Cuthbert finishes unbuttoning his own shirt and shrugs it off. After only a moment’s hesitation, he removes his undershirt as well, so that he is bare to the waist. His chest is flat enough, after all; Steven had not lied when he said that stocky Alain had more tits than him. 

As soon as it is bare, she puts her hands on the skin thus revealed, stroking her palms up his flat, firm belly with an appreciative noise. “A well-formed young lord,” she crows, delighted, “and more muscular than you looked dressed! Are you a soldier, then? For you are surely no man of leisure.”

“A gunslinger, sweet lady,” he tells her. There is no sense hiding it, not here in Gilead. "Though, I must confess, lest you be too impressed, only a novice.” Perhaps he ought to be going about strapped, but there seems little point to it when, armed with his knife and sling and bare hands alone, he is still more dangerous than most men he will ever meet. Some of the other novices do go swaggering about with their guns on their hips at every opportunity, but he sees no need to.

She looks duly impressed at this revelation anyway. “My word, are you really? Well, that’ll be a feather in  _ my _ cap when I tell the other girls.” She drops one hand to his thigh, grinning up at him, and says, “Might I hold your gun then? It looks to me as if you need someone to cock it for you - or have you simply had too much to drink? It’s no problem if so, for there is still plenty of fun we two can have -” So saying, she reaches to unbutton his pants and slide her hand inside, cupping expectantly at where she expects his cock to be.

Of course, there is no such thing waiting her. He rocks forward against the pressure of her hand, so desperately pleased to at least have some friction, while his lust-fogged brain struggles to think of how best to explain the situation to her. Most likely he ought to have done it from the beginning, but he’s never had to - the only people he’s ever been any amount of intimate with have already known.

To her credit, she hardly falters despite her obvious surprise, and after a moment of exploratory groping about, shifts the angle of her wrist to slide her hand further in between his legs, cupping at him with her fingers and palm so he can grind into the heel of her hand. There’s no hiding it, not with how she’s touching him, not with the way he’s soaked clean through his drawers.

“Here I was,” she says, “all ready to learn how to handle a fine weapon, and I find it’s more of a holster situation. Are you a woman, then, with a man’s tastes? It’s no matter if you are, for I’m not squeamish about serving such.” And indeed, the way she’s got her fingers pressing up into his wet slit suggests more than a passing familiarity with the anatomy in question.

“I’m a man with a man’s tastes,” he manages to get out, though his voice has gone unaccountably high and tight. “‘Tis a perilous life, gunslinging. I had my cock shot off in the war.”

“So ‘twas quite insensitive of me to speak so of guns, then? What war was that, though?” She rocks her hand against him, drawing a wholly unintended whimper out of him. 

“Why - why, it was John Farson’s war, whose else?” Being touched so through his drawers is not enough. Too dulled, while at the same time the fabric is too rough against his tender parts. He grips her by the wrist and pulls her hand out of his pants, then hurries to shove down drawers and pants both and get them off his legs. In his haste he is awkward and fumbling, though she generously does not laugh at either his clumsiness or his obvious eagerness.

“My,” she murmurs once he’s bared himself before her, “I suppose I can see why you thought my own parts small.” She takes his stiff and swollen clit between her thumb and forefinger and strokes it the way he likes to do himself, her tone and expression both obviously fascinated. “For my part, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one so large. It’s just like a little cock, isn’t it?”

“Quite like,” he agrees senselessly, shuddering at her touch. “Quite - yes, I’ve always thought so. God, but you’ve clever fingers.”

“Oh, I practice every day,” she says sweetly, batting her eyes up at him, and laughs. “Can I suck you? I’d dearly love to see how it feels in my mouth.”

The surge of lust he feels at that mental image strikes him like a blow to the stomach, so that for a moment he cannot breathe or speak. Finally he takes in a shaky breath and says, equally shakily, “God, yes.”

She has him shift aside so she can sink to her knees on the floor. He sits on the side of the bed, legs spread around her, and leans back at the gentle press of her hand against his stomach, propping himself up on his elbows so he can look down the length of his body and watch what she does.

At first she simply teases him, kissing and nuzzling at the insides of his thighs, until finally he is moved to tell her to get on with it, as sternly as he can manage under the circumstances. That does not turn out to be particularly stern at all, and the way she grins at him tells him she is not cowed in the slightest. Still, she does, finally, put her mouth to him.

When first she touches him with her tongue - just gently tracing the tip of his clit with it, all soft and wet and warm - he shudders all over and lets out a moan, all unintended. She keeps at that for a time, performing a dizzying array of actions that prove her tongue to be as clever as her fingers. She uses the tip to trace out the shape of him, the broad flat to lick at him, and curls her tongue around it to draw it into her mouth, sliding her wet lips over it and suckling. He jerks as if electrified, making a high, strangled noise, and reaches out to plunge one hand into her hair.

Big it might be, for what it is, but she can easily fit the whole thing in her mouth without moving. She bobs her head up and down anyway, sucking wetly at him, to put on a fine show, just as if she were sucking a real cock.

It’s intoxicating to watch. He can imagine that he does have a proper cock buried in her mouth, watching her, and being able to so picture that increases his already-dizzying arousal immensely. From time to time he finds himself dropping his head back and closing his eyes, overcome by the sensation, although he continually tries to open them again and look back down at her, for he does not wish to miss even a second of this.

All too quickly he feels himself getting close. He tightens the hand in her hair and tugs, trying not to pull too hard or cruelly. 

She comes off with a particularly obscene, wet pop and makes a show of licking her lips. “My lord?”

“I -” He cannot even think what he wants to say. It is clear enough in his head, but only as a series of disjointed images. Finally, he gets his normally talkative mouth into some sort of order, and manages to tell her, “I’m very - I don’t wish to finish yet. I want - I want - god!” He puts his hands over his face and takes a deep breath, trying to calm himself, to gather his scattered thoughts. “I don’t know what I want, I suppose. I wish to have you. To fuck you, that’s what I wish to do.”

She sits back on her haunches, hands on his knees, and cocks her head. “I don’t think you simply mean to diddle me with those lovely long fingers, do you?” she asks gently. 

It is a tempting thought - he can imagine how sweet and wet and warm her cunt would be, squeezing down around his fingers, how fine it would be to lay against her and rub her little clit with his thumb until she came again, this time at his own hands - but no, it is not what he wants. He wants the same feeling that looking down at her as she knelt between his legs and sucked him off gave him.

“I want to have you as a man does,” he says frankly. A wave of heat rolls over him, lust and shame combined. It makes him feel very raw to have to ask her to help him have that, to be reminded so baldly that he cannot simply do it naturally.

“Oh, yes, I can provide you with a tool most suited to that task,” she purrs, and presses a sticky kiss to the inside of his thigh. “More finely-crafted a tool than any a man was ever born with, truth be told. Give me but a moment.” So saying, she rises to her feet and turns to rummage in the chest of drawers against the opposite wall, giving him an excellent view of her lovely and well-turned buttocks. Stimulating a view as it is, it gives him time to try and collect himself, so that when she turns back he feels somewhat more in control.

She has in her hands a smoothly polished stick, with a sudden curve and rounded bulb at one end and a flat, flared base at the other, and a complicated collection of leather straps. The one is easy enough to guess the use of. The other looks like a piece of horse tack or perhaps some manner of torture device.

“Hopefully we can take it in enough to fit your skinny hips,” she says, “for I’m a bit more amply built than you.”

The harness - for that is what it proves indeed to be - does indeed fit over his own hips with a bit of fiddling. Cuthbert regards the thing with some bemusement even as the whore is showing him how to step into it and fasten it about himself and then slide the longstick through it so that it’s held firmly in place. The flat base sits such that he can press it back into himself and grind against it, providing pleasant friction. 

“Do you find yourself often entertaining customers of my sort, then?” he asks her, fascinated. “I did not imagine it was such a common condition.”

“Of your sort, no. But we see women, sometimes, and some who wish to play a more dominant role, and you would be surprised how many men want a woman to bend them over the bed and fuck them.” At his plainly startled look, she winks. “It’s quite stimulating for a man to be taken so, or so I do believe.”

“I suppose so.” 

“Is it so difficult for you to imagine a man might enjoy being taken?” she asks, stepping close and putting a hand to his chest. “There are men who enjoy each other’s company more than that of women, you know, and they find it to be good fun as well.”

“I know that,” Cuthbert says stiffly. “Only - well. I suppose perhaps it is different when a woman does it. I’ve been had by a man myself, not just once but many times -” and why his damnable loose tongue is spilling this out, to a whore whose name he doesn’t even know of all people, he cannot say, but neither can he make himself stop once he has started; it all comes rushing out in a flood, faster and faster until he nearly starts to trip over his own words - “an older man he is, and married, a friend of my father and the father of my friend. I’ve never found it to be aught but painful and humiliating, save once when I gleaned some brief pleasure from imagining it was someone else inside me.” Of that shameful incident, at least, he finds himself able to keep quiet. He has been most successful in not thinking of Steven throughout this encounter, and now that he is it has dampened his ardor somewhat. 

He feels a queer sort of guilt, as well. Was he not told, at their last meeting, that he belonged to Steven and Steven alone? And has he not avoided Alain, who his heart and body both want, ever since their last meeting, in service of that command? He tells himself that this is not the same - Steven said he might not lay with any other man, and this lovely woman before him is surely no man - but he knows in his heart that Steven would not be pleased to know of this encounter.

There is a troubled look on her face - troubled and soft with something terribly close to pity - and when she opens her mouth to speak he puts his finger against her lips to stop her. “It is his right to have me so, and his right to treat me however he wishes during the act. Perhaps I might like it more did I not feel so used or so womanish, being beneath him. I do not wish to speak of it further. I wish to have you and make a man of myself.”

She does not try to speak of it further. She kisses him very gently, then takes hold of him by the wooden stick jutting out from his crotch and walks him back over to the bed. Without being asked, she lays herself down on her back, legs spread invitingly.

The flames of his arousal were not smothered by such an unpleasant memory, but merely banked. Seeing her so - and having so recently felt her pressed against him that his skin is still warmed by the heat of her body - brings them roaring back. He kneels between her legs and shuffles up the bed to lean over her.

This part, at least, he knows, if not from this angle. She helps guide him into her, letting loose a low and satisfied moan as he slides in. 

Although he cannot feel her from the inside, it is deeply satisfying. She wraps her legs around his waist, pulling him in tighter, and rocks up against him. He moves with her, panting with exertion and arousal both, and the movement of their hips pushes the base of the longstick back against him so that he feels pleasure from the base act as well as from thinking about what he’s doing. She’s still very wet from having brought herself off earlier, and the soft, wet sounds that come from where they’re joined drive him into a frenzy of arousal.

Once he gets the hang of the rhythm, he goes faster and harder, plunging himself as deep into her as he can. The bed rocks and creaks beneath them, and she is moved up the mattress until she reaches back to brace herself against the headboard. Perhaps it hurts her - he recalls well enough how it hurt him when he was fucked so vigorously - but she does not try to move away or ask him to stop. She moans lustily and matches his speed with her own movements, and the wet sounds grow deeper and wetter and more delightfully obscene.

And for the first time in a long time, he feels a sense of power. He feels like a proper man, just as he’d hoped. No longer is he the one laid out flat and being fucked, receptacle of a man’s pleasure; now he is the actor, the aggressor, working his will upon this wet and willing woman. The way she bucks and writhes beneath him, the way she moans and whimpers out meaningless love-prattle - it makes him feel immense, almost godlike. He is not a gangly stripling of a novice but a grown and potent man, a being of great power, a colossus striding the world and changing it to his whims.

He is soaked with sweat and panting like a bellows when he comes. His orgasm hits him suddenly and unexpectedly, so fierce it almost hurts. He shudders, moaning out all high and thin as if in great pain, and pushes as deep inside her as he can to grind his hips in tight and needy circles against the base of the stick. His cunt clenches desperately, achingly empty and longing for something to fill it; this he ignores, for it is simply a dumb body part that can act only according to its nature, even when that nature is at odds with his own. The will of the spirit overrides the desires of the flesh.

Spent, he barely manages to pull himself out of her before he collapses. They are both very sweaty and their skin sticks together unpleasantly, but he does not wish to move. He wishes to lay right where he is, pressed up against her with his head on her bosom.

After a moment, her hand comes up to pet at his hair. He lets out a soft sigh and closes his eyes. Every part of him suddenly aches, and he wishes nothing more than to fall asleep here, nestled in her arms.

“Rouse yourself up just a bit, young lord,” she says softly, “and get you out of that harness before you fall asleep, eh?”

This he does, though reluctantly and only half-awake. As soon as he’s free of the thing he lays right back down on her and lets himself drift off, wrapped in the warm comfort of her woman’s smell and the tingling pleasure of her fingers stroking over his scalp.

**Author's Note:**

> A brief note: the ways which Cuthbert thinks about his own body and identity are not necessarily the way a modern trans person would. This is because he is a medieval fantasy apocalypse cowboy. 
> 
> Steven is just being an asshole.


End file.
